ATI Technologies, a leading developer of graphics chips and multimedia processors, recently said it was going to use the same design verification tools from Cadence as its arch-rival NVIDIA Corp. has used to emulate the GeForce 6800-series products during development process.

Cadence Incisive Palladium acceleration and emulation system to verify some of its highly complex designs. The Palladium accelerator/emulator, a key technology of the Incisive functional verification platform, provides the speed and efficiency that is critical for verification of advanced integrated circuits (ICs) that require high-performance processing and memory.

NVIDIA, using the Cadence Incisive Palladium acceleration/emulation system, significantly reduced its verification time for NVIDIA’s latest GeForce 6800 graphics processor, its most complex, highest-performance chip to date, Cadence said. NVIDIA reports that the verification time savings enabled by the Palladium system allowed it to meet the market window for its new product with increased confidence in hardware performance and software quality.

“We chose the Cadence Palladium accelerator/emulator because of its superior technology in our design space. The Palladium system provided the features we needed to meet stringent product delivery schedules and increased our ability to test our ASICs and application-level software. The Palladium system enhanced our testing productivity by providing fast compile time, efficient debug, high run-time performance, and excellent target interface solutions. The result was more highly tested silicon and system software,” said Dave DiOrio, vice president, engineering.

It is unclear for which chips Markham, Ontario-based ATI Technologies plans to use the Incisive Palladium emulation system, or whether ATI has already used the tools for processors to be unveiled in short-term future.

ATI Technologies is expected to announce its new performance-mainstream RADEON X700 visual processing unit on September 15, 2004. In 2005 the company is remoured to launch its code-named R520 graphics chip.