CoBALT is a custom processor-based system ideally suited for use early in the design cycle to accelerate simulation up to 10,000X over a software simulator. The new Mercury Plus in-circuit emulator builds on the technology developed for Quickturn's Mercury design verification system, the most successful product in Quickturn's history. With Quickturn's custom FPGA, million gate designs can frequently be compiled in less than one hour. High Debug Productivity Quickturn's custom FPGA contains a hardware logic analyzer. With the logic analyzer built in, designers can move probes instantly, avoiding lengthy delays for recompiling probes.
New firmware improves probe data upload time by over ten times.
Together, these improvements allow designers to find and fix 2-3 bugs per day compared to 1 bug per day in other emulation systems. In addition, a memory system with up to 2 gigabytes of memory supports large testbenches and software code for High-Performance regression testing. Accurate Design Modeling Mercury Plus does not use timing re-synthesis like many other emulators. Instead, it provides 32 low-skew clock lines routed throughout the emulator and carefully analyzes and compensates for clock line delay resulting in the most accurate design model. Because of this Mercury Plus finds asynchronous design flaws other emulators miss.