Mentor Graphics and Ixia Collaborate to Accelerate Verification of Networking Chips

WILSONVILLE, Ore., April 12, 2016 – Mentor Graphics Corp. (Nasdaq: MENT), today announced a collaboration with Ixia, a leading provider of network testing, visibility, and security solutions. As a result, Mentor is integrating Ixia’s virtual edition test product family – IxNetwork® Virtual Edition (VE) – with the Mentor® Veloce® emulation platform to accelerate the verification of complex networking chips. As part of this collaboration, Ixia joined the Mentor OpenDoor® program.

As a result, networking customers have the ability to seamlessly integrate an Ixia virtual environment into an emulation-based verification flow, bringing the powerful advantages of emulation to the lab environment. This allows the reuse of traffic flow generation scripts for greater efficiency and improved debug, and gives customers the ability to de-risk the challenges of complex chip designs.

The resulting new Mentor product, the Veloce Virtual Network (VN) App, was driven by the Veloce team based on the requests and support of mutual customers. The development work needed to complete the Veloce VN App was accomplished through the cooperation of the R&D organizations at both Mentor and Ixia.

“Emulation provides a huge performance advantage for full-chip verification,” said, Scott Westlake, Vice President Business Development, Ixia. “It is natural for Mentor and Ixia to collaborate and drive a ‘shift left’ that expands the use of virtualized testing to accelerate the delivery of networking chips to market.”

Many networking customers who use the Veloce emulation platform asked for a tighter integration with Ixia’s IxNetwork VE, as both are critical for new product delivery. The Veloce VN App creates a highly optimized flow from simulation to the lab for greater efficiency and improved debug. A working prototype of the integration is available for demonstration to mutual customers in the Mentor emulation lab in Fremont California.

“Our leadership and market share in networking continues to grow rapidly,” said Eric Selosse, vice president and general manager of the Mentor Emulation Division. “The Veloce VN App, created in close collaboration with the excellent team at Ixia, is an example of Mentor setting the stage for Veloce Networking 2.0.”

The Veloce VN App joins other apps in the arsenal of software innovations for the Veloce emulation platform. Mentor continues to expand the library of Veloce Apps to introduce new ways to ensure designs meet their functional and performance specifications on schedule.

About the Veloce Emulation Platform
The Veloce emulation platform uses innovative software, running on powerful, qualified hardware and an extensible operating system, to target design risks faster than hardware-centric strategies. Now considered among the most versatile and powerful of verification tools, emulation is used by project teams for hardware debugging, hardware/software co-verification or integration, system-level prototyping, low-power verification and power estimation and performance characterization.

The Veloce emulation platform is a core technology in the Mentor Enterprise Verification Platform™ (EVP) – a platform that boosts productivity in ASIC and SoC functional verification by combining advanced verification technologies in a comprehensive platform. The Mentor EVP combines Questa® advanced verification solutions, the Veloce emulation platform, and the Visualizer™ debug environment into a globally accessible, high-performance, datacenter resource. The Mentor EVP features global resource management that supports project teams around the world, maximizing both user productivity and total verification return on investment.