Mentor Graphics has introduced its hardware-assisted offering for verification of Serial-ATA (SATA) II products, including hard disk drives (HDD) and optical CD/DVD drives.

Mentor Graphics said that the new product enables designers to test their system-on-chips (SoCs) that control a HDD or optical drive, by providing hardware-based model of the disk drive connected to their SoC. This iSolve SATA product has a ‘plug-and-play’ interface to the Veloce family of hardware-assisted emulators, allowing to verify SATA designs.

Also, the company notes that, the new product adds to the existing iSolve family of products for the verification of applications such as multimedia, networking, embedded systems, wireless, and storage devices.

Combined with the Veloce emulation family, the iSolve SATA product is expected to offer system verification environment to develop new SoCs containing a SATA controller. The new product is said to offer productive debug environment which provides access to bug detecting transactions and is a compliant to SATA 2.6 standard.

According to the company, the iSolve SATA product can be used with in-circuit emulation (ICE) as well as a transaction-based acceleration mode of operation. The ability to mix and match ICE capabilities with transaction-based acceleration facilitates the transition from simulation-centric use models to in-circuit emulation.