Today's System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designers face numerous design challenges. Reduced time-to-market force DSP-based designers to wrestle with increased functionality, verification and testing all on a condensed timetable. Not only do ZSP processors provide the easy instruction set and programming model available for a DSP, VeriSilicon offers industry standard tools and development kits to help minimize those development challenges.
ZView is the Software Development Tools package for ZSP processor family. ZView is a full-feature, easy-to-use suite of tools consisting of an IDE, compiler, assembler, linker, debugger, simulators, and profiling utilities supported on Windows 2000/NT/XP, Solaris 2.x and Linux platforms. ZView incorporates a number of significant new product enhancements and tools to accelerate software development.
ZSP Reference Silicon incorporates the ZSP subsystem along with other system peripherals to enable a platform that could help customers build prototypes and validate their own SoC designs. The reference silicon is also available bundled with an evaluation board to provide a high-speed development platform.
Development boards are an important part of the ZSP support infrastructure enabling real-time customer demonstrations and evaluations, software development and prototyping. There are boards available to meet the distinct needs of SoC and application developers.
For evaluation and SoC prototyping purposes, ZSP reference or development boards can be used standalone to enable customers to develop applications and test them. In some cases, customers can also integrate their own boards to prototype their SoC architecture. The reference boards incorporate a ZSP test chip and sometimes an FPGA to allow customers to map their own logic in the FPGA and interface to a ZSP subsystem. Test chips can have a single instance of ZSP core or multiple instances depending upon the core. Also available on board is an SDRAM and JTAG interface. The boards also have an expansion header. Optional expansion boards are available for specific needs, such as audio codec, HDMI controller and other functionalities. Some boards are in the versatile form factor and can easily be integrated with other Versatile form factor boards.
JTAG emulator probes offer programmers high speed connectivity to ZSP based hardware to develop and debug applications. The ZSP-USB-JTAG probe is a compact and portable and integrates with ZView tools on any of the supported platforms.
The ZSP-USB-JTAG emulator probe enables efficient and productive embedded software debugging. This compact and portable probe is powered by the USB port and utilizes the JTAG interface for debugging ZSP processors. It integrates with ZView development tools and supports unlimited breakpoints within all ranges of program memory in RAM. The ZSP JTAG probe also supports multi-core debugging and can if necessary be used over a TCP/IP connection. The compact probe makes it highly portable and can be used with laptops and other devices. A flexible ribbon cable provides a set of connectors. The primary provides the minimum JTAG connectivity and the secondary connector offers extra control signals which can be used to control the target processor.
