Smarter Chips, Faster Checks: GravityXR Leading the XR Verification Shift

From immersive gaming to virtual collaboration, the XR chips powering these experiences are becoming more advanced—and more complex.

As the industry races ahead, companies face a critical challenge: How to make sure these increasingly sophisticated chips not only work flawlessly but are also ready on time.

GravityXR stepped up to solve this with the Palladium Emulation Platform—a smart solution that accelerates verification cycles by boosting throughput, improving debugging turnaround times, and overall system-level verification coverage.

The Problem We're Solving

As XR chips grow more complex, GravityXR was facing mounting pressure to keep pace with rapid innovation. Traditional verification methods are slow and fragmented to handle the intricacies of modern XR hardware/software co-designs, making it tough to catch system-level issues early. Additionally, the race to get quality products to market faster meant not having first silicon and first software success on time can negatively impact market opportunity in a significant way.

GravityXR needed a smarter, faster way to verify silicon together with system-level software, and they have decided to adopt Palladium emulation platform to accelerate verification and to ensure a high-quality product that can meet their time-to-market window.

The Solution: Palladium

The Palladium Emulation Platform supports co-verification—bringing hardware and software together to build a fast, flexible, and thorough environment for XR chip verification. The designed flow supported:

1. Integration of virtual device models with Accelerated VIP (CSI-2)
2. Flow from testbench → image files → AVIP → DUT
3. Hybrid verification (workstation + Palladium)

Some of the highlighted feature set:

• Emulation Performance: Palladium enables MHz emulation runs that support different XR chip configurations and give near real-time feedback by deploying AVIP CSI and DSI for virtual protocol debugging. This means engineers can catch issues early and fix them faster.
• FullVision Debug: It helps automate a lot of the debugging workflow, which saves a ton of time. Instead of manually hunting down bugs, the emulation with FullVision Debug can help pinpoint the source of issues quickly.
• System-level Coverage: It doesn't just check if hardware and software work together—it digs deep into performance, interface behavior, and potential problem areas to make sure everything is solid.

Image-based stimulus injected into the CSI-2 interface (AVIP) during emulation using Palladium Emulation.

What's the Impact?

With Palladium emulation platform as an integral part of the solution, below are some of the advantages GravityXR reported:

• Faster and Robust Development: Verification is way more efficient now, which means products get to market quicker.
• Better Stability: With thorough testing and real-time insights, the chips are more reliable and robust.
• Proven Performance: The platform has already powered through over 1,500 successful iterations, helping teams hit major milestones and move closer to commercial launch.

Conclusion

Adopting the Palladium Emulation Platform gave GravityXR the edge—faster workflows, high-quality chips, and teams that move with higher confidence.

As the XR industry continues to evolve, Cadence hardware-assisted verification tools will continue to remain at the core of system-level verification—helping to solve the most challenging HW/SW co-verification workloads while helping GravityXR's engineers to innovate the future of immersive technology.