
The tool now commercially released is the fruit of nearly three calendar years and 30+ person years of development, it has already been successfully deployed at multiple companies, the company says.
Metrics is delivering the benefits of a true cloud solution to SoC design and verification, including on-demand deployment, high reliability, and team collaboration. The company is also removing the traditional high overhead for configuring and maintaining the hardware and software needed for a robust verification environment. At the same time, it is addressing the historical obstacles to broad cloud adoption, such as security concerns and workflow integration.
“We founded Metrics to bring the compelling advantages of a secure, collaborative, cloud-based workflow to SoC design and verification teams,” said Doug Letcher, President and CEO of Metrics and former VP of Engineering at verification services firm XtremeEDA.
“Our solutions are built to plug-and-play into existing workflows – to enable companies to achieve optimal utilization of software licenses, compute hardware, and engineering staff time.”
Because the Metrics Cloud Simulator & Verification Manager is a true cloud solution, it has the rapid elasticity to instantly scale commensurate with variable demand. The simulation resources are automatically adjusted up or down, dynamically by the minute, without having to purchase additional hardware, licenses, or manage disk space.
“Rapidly increasing demand for functional simulation, and particularly the need to avoid the delays that occur during peak demand, is driving companies to adopt cloud-based verification,” explains Letcher.
Metric Cloud Simulator & Verification Manager includes a complete, SystemVerilog IEEE 1800-2012 compliant simulator. The simulator includes support for constraint solving, SVA checking, functional coverage, and all standard test bench and RTL constructs. UVM is thus fully supported. Because it is a true cloud simulator, every authorized team member can have immediate unlimited access even during peak demand.
Customers are provided with a web-based interface, enabling a 365/24 access for productive collaboration around the world. The cloud verification manager supports continuous integration to keep code functional and teams productive. Its regression triage flow helps debug test failures, with the ability to view and filter test history, including logs, waves, and code revision data. The tool supports a data-driven functional coverage closure via measurement & optimization and provides visibility into a project at engineering and management levels.
Plug-and-play in existing workflows, the cloud solution can be deployed into existing design and verification workflows via a securely hosted Git repository. Verification results can also be downloaded for use with other verification tools. Companies can specify appropriate role-based permission levels for different users to launch simulation jobs and view pertinent verification results.
The data is fully encrypted during transmission and can be fully encrypted at rest. Metrics also uses a high-reliability, redundant architecture to protect all customer data.
The company uses the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and is a Google Strategic Technology Partner. Each Metrics customer gets a dedicated cluster of machines within GCP, which is one of the most secure and reliable compute environments available today, Metrics says.
What’s more the Metrics API provides a robust set of interfaces for quickly building or integrating verification applications as part of a complete cloud verification environment. The pricing model is entirely pay-by-minute, at $.04/minute/simulation job.
Metrics Technologies – www.metrics.ca
