About Liga Systems
Liga Systems, Inc. is a privately held EDA company focused on delivering lightning-fast RTL and Gate-level simulation to the desktop. The company serves test, verification and IP markets with breakthrough hybrid simulation technology that turbocharges performance at a dramatically reduced cost. Liga's plug-in VLIW coprocessor card leverages existing simulation infrastructure, handles SoC designs of up to 300 million gates, and eliminates the need to implement designs in FPGA-or processor-based hardware accelerators. Liga Systems' mission is to dramatically improve the verification cycle for IC and SOC design.
Liga Systems, Inc. is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California
IC design complexity outpaces functional verification solutions
As verification demands increase, conventional software-only simulation methodologies and hardware accelerator technologies suffer performance limitations and are incompatible, resulting in bottlenecks and soaring costs. IC design complexity is swiftly outpacing traditional functional verification solutions, resulting in verification bottlenecks that current methodologies, tools and technologies are unable to resolve effectively. Meanwhile, IC design and verification costs are escalating - especially functional verification - and the need for simulation coverage is growing exponentially with design size. Teams that turn to conventional hardware accelerators to increase performance by implementing the design soon discover this technology is fundamentally incompatible with software simulators and the logic used by testbenches. What they need is 10 or more times the acceleration of current traditional software solutions, at 10-100 times less cost than that of current hardware solutions - a combination not currently offered. The ideal solution would bypass having to implement the design, overcome performance limitations of standard CPU architectures, eliminate cache memory problems and be transparent to the simulation software.Liga Systems' Hybrid Simulator - NitroSIM™
Liga Systems has overcome these issues with NitroSIM, a patented, plug-in Hybrid Simulator that boosts desktop and compute farm server simulation speed by 10x or more. It does so by turbocharging existing compute hardware on designs of up to 300M gates. To users, it looks like an ordinary software simulation executed on conventional computers, only much faster. All testbenches and assertions are deployed without tedious interfacing that conventional hardware accelerators require, and designs need not be implemented in FPGAs or processors. The resulting time savings means NitroSIM can be applied throughout the design flow, from small block to chip. Its massively parallel processing capability also eliminates cache memory miss problems. Without changing the simulation flow, NitroSiM solves large ASIC and SoC computation problems that formerly required costly, complex supercomputers or server farms. Priced 10 to 100 times less than current hardware accelerators, NitroSIM - with its universal productivity increases, scalability and ability to simplify existing methodologies - is ideal for RTL, verification and IP engineers.Unlike hardware accelerators, NitroSim doesn't require FPGAs or processors to map the design functionality, as the design is compiled, in its entirety, onto memory. With its small form factor, NitroSIM fits inside a desktop or server PC as a plug-in upgrade, requiring no additional space. NitroSIM's compile and set-up time is comparable to simulators, enabling its application in all phases of the design; from small blocks, to big blocks, to the entire chip, to multi-chip. This breakthrough solution now gives users the ability to simulate and verify entire systems at high simulation speeds at an affordable cost.
