ProDesign Integrates ASIC & SoC Prototyping Systems with New Novas Siloti Visibility Enhancement Product.SAN JOSE San Jose, city, United States San Jose (sănəzā`, săn hōzā`), city (1990 pop. 782,248), seat of Santa Clara co., W central Calif.; founded 1777, inc. 1850. , Calif. & MUNICH, Germany -- New Host Controlled Debugging Tool (HCD HCD Housing and Community Development HCD Hardware Configuration Definition (IBM mainframes) HCD Human Capacity Development HCD Health Care Delivery HCD Hockey Club Davos (Swiss Ice Hockey Club) ) for CHIPit Systems Works with Novas' Siloti SilVE Product to Reduce Verification Time of Complex ICs and SoCs ProDesign, the leading supplier of high-speed ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) Pronounced "a-sick." A chip that is custom designed for a specific application rather than a general-purpose chip such as a microprocessor. & SoC prototyping systems, announced that it is integrating its newest CHIPit Platinum V4 ASIC verification system with the Siloti(TM) Visibility Enhancement product introduced separately today by Novas Software Novas Software was founded in 1996 by Dr. Paul Huang to address the ongoing problem of debugging chip designs. Since then, Novas has grown to employ over 130 people with office locations across the world including Texas, New Hampshire, the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, India, , Inc. The integration leverages ProDesign's new HCD Tool which expands the design debugging functionality of prototyping systems. The integrated solution will provide users with very fast prototyping while enabling full internal design visibility for efficient debug To correct a problem in hardware or software. Debugging software means locating the errors in the source code (the program logic). Debugging hardware means finding errors in the circuit design (logical circuits) or in the physical interconnections of the circuits. . The new CHIPit Platinum V4 is based on the latest Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) A type of gate array that is programmed in the field rather than in a semiconductor fab. Containing up to hundreds of thousands of gates, there are a variety of FPGA architectures on the market. technology and equipped with the new HCD (Host Controlled Debugging) mechanism. The HCD tool allows users to have full access to the internal signal data from the FPGAs used in the scaleable CHIPit Platinum System. Together, the Novas Siloti SilVE(TM) product and the HCD tool analyze and configure the system so that only the essential register values that need to be observed are extracted during operation. That data is then expanded within the Siloti SilVE environment enabling full signal value visibility and correlated back to the original register transfer level (RTL (Register Transfer Level) A high-level hardware description language (HDL) for defining digital circuits. The circuits are described as a collection of registers, Boolean equations, control logic such as "if-then-else" statements as well as complex event sequences; ) design description for debug with the Novas Verdi(TM) Automated Debug System. The resulting methodology provides developers of multi-million gate designs portioned over multiple FPGAs with greater observability of internal signal activity for faster verification and debug. "We're delighted to collaborate with ProDesign to make it easier for engineers to observe and comprehend design behavior during prototype verification and validation Verification and Validation (V&V) is the process of checking that a product, service, or system meets specifications and that it fulfills its intended purpose. These are critical components of a quality management system such as ISO 9000. ," said Scott Sandler, president and chief executive officer of Novas. "ProDesign's CHIPit high speed verification systems and our Siloti and Verdi products help achieve this goal with new innovative technologies that provide full design visibility with minimal overhead for debugging complex problems." "Today's generation of ASIC/SoC devices, and particularly large prototype designs containing multiple FPGAs on a single board, are becoming increasingly difficult to debug," said Gerhard Scherer, President of ProDesign Electronics Corporation. "We are excited to take our collaboration with Novas to the next level, bringing together the benefits of high speed prototyping with enhanced verification and debug. Our new HCD tool, in combination with visibility enhancement capabilities from Novas, provides a mechanism for gaining valuable insight into the operation of multi-million gate designs in the shortest possible time." Availability The HCD tool will be released in mid March, 2006. It will be available for CHIPit Master licenses and supports up to 21 FPGAs in a system. As all CHIPit software, the HCD tool will run on Linux, Solaris and Windows operating systems Operating systems can be categorized by technology, ownership, licensing, working state, usage, and by many other characteristics. In practice, many of these groupings may overlap. . About CHIPit hardware-assisted verification platforms The CHIPit line provides an integrated set of tools with debug capabilities that provide a dual solution for hardware and software verification Software verification is a broad and complex discipline of software engineering whose goal is to assure that a software fully satisfies all the expected requirements. There are two fundamental approaches to verification:
About the HCD (Host Controlled Debugging) Tool The HCD tool allows users to pull out register values from the system during specific time windows and to write them into a signal file. Support for the industry-standard Value Change Dump Value Change Dump is an ASCII-based format for dumpfiles generated by EDA logic simulation tools. The standard, four-value VCD format was defined along with the Verilog hardware description language by the IEEE Standard 1364-1995 in 1995. (VCD See Video CD. VCD - Video Compact Disc ) format ensures compatibility with many third-party tools, while planned support for Novas' widely-used Fast Signal Database (FSDB FSDB Florida School for the Deaf and Blind FSDB Filesystem Database FSDB Finance Service Delivery Branch ) format will provide optimal integration with the Novas Siloti(TM) and Verdi(TM) products. With complete access to all FPGAs in the CHIPit Platinum system, the HCD tool gives the user full control over the system clock and resets, and the ability to automatically buffer register data into CHIPit memory or directly write the data to the appropriate file on the host side. About ProDesign Founded in 1981 and privately held, ProDesign and has over 80 employees, with facilities for research, design, and sales in Germany, France and the U.S. The company's CHIPit family of hardware-assisted verification tools to validate algorithm performance, verify hardware implementation, and assist in hardware/software co-development and co-verification to reduce the verification time dramatically. For more information about the company's prototyping products, please visit: http://www.uchipit.com. About Novas Novas Software, Inc. is the leading provider of design comprehension solutions for engineers designing complex ICs, embedded systems Embedded systems Computer systems that cannot be programmed by the user because they are preprogrammed for a specific task and are buried within the equipment they serve. and SoCs. Novas' Verdi automated debug and Siloti visibility enhancement products dramatically accelerate the process for understanding and correcting design problems starting from system-level specification through silicon implementation. Novas is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. with offices in Europe, Japan and Asia-Pacific. For more information, visit http://www.novas.com or email info@novas.com Verdi, Siloti, and SilVE are trademarks of Novas Software, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ProDesign and CHIPit are registered trademarks of ProDesign Electronics Corporation. All other trademarks or registered trademarks mentioned in this release are the intellectual property of their respective owners. |
|
||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion