Cadence Incisive Specman Elite Testbench Reduces Verification Time for Sharp by 50 Percent

SAN JOSE, Calif., 17 Mar 2014 -- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDNS), a leader in global electronic design innovation, today announced that Sharp deployed Cadence® Incisive® Specman® Elite Testbench to develop a combined proximity and ambient light sensor for smartphones, tablets and digital single-lens reflex cameras. By utilizing Incisive Specman Elite Testbench, Sharp reduced its hardware verification time by 50 percent, which enabled the company to meet its product target dates with higher quality.

Sharp utilized the metric-driven verification (MDV) methodology with Incisive Specman Elite Testbench for automatic job management and result analysis, which helped reduce human errors and man-hours of the verification management tasks. The constrained random capability of the Incisive Specman Elite Testbench enabled Sharp to find difficult corner-case bugs easily in their register-transfer level (RTL) in one day, which would have taken 10 days under prior methods of directed tests. In addition, Sharp improved the overall productivity of its verification team by building a Universal Verification Methodology for Specman e (UVM-e) environment for reusability, which reduced the time for testbench creation by 70 percent and saved a month of engineering time.

"We were able to hit our release date and deliver our product on time, with confidence that the design would result in working silicon by weeding out difficult bugs in a minimal amount of time," said Toshiyuki Ichinose, department general manager of Electronic Components and Devices Division at Sharp Corporation. "In the development of new models, the reusability of the Incisive Specman Elite environment allowed a reduction of design time."

For more information on Incisive Specman Elite, visit www.cadence.com/sites/specman.

About Cadence

Cadence enables global electronic design innovation and plays an essential role in the creation of today’s integrated circuits and electronics. Customers use Cadence software, hardware, IP, and services to design and verify advanced semiconductors, consumer electronics, networking and telecommunications equipment, and computer systems. The company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., with sales offices, design centers, and research facilities around the world to serve the global electronics industry. More information about the company, its products, and services is available here.