SpiraTech, Novas Collaborate to Deliver Powerful Transaction-Based Debug Solution.SAN JOSE, Calif. -- OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) The rebranding of equipment and selling it. The term initially referred to the company that made the products (the "original" manufacturer), but eventually became widely used to refer to the organization that buys the products and Agreement Combines SpiraTech's State-of-the-Art Transaction Tools with Novas' Automated Debug Solutions to Accelerate Understanding of ESL (1) An earlier family of client/server development tools for Windows and OS/2 from Ardent Software (formerly VMARK). It was originally developed by Easel Corporation, which was acquired by VMARK. Designs SpiraTech, Ltd., a pioneer in mixed abstraction verification, and Novas Software, Inc., the leader in debug systems for complex chip designs, today jointly announced they have entered into an OEM agreement. SpiraTech's Cohesive(TM) technology will supply transaction capture and generation technology for Novas' new nESL(TM) system debug product. (See related February 28, 2005 release from Novas) The Novas-SpiraTech collaboration will produce a highly automated transaction-based debug solution. It will raise the visualisation and understanding of complex on-chip communications structures to the Electronic System Level (ESL) of abstraction. The result will be a savings of many weeks of debug and analysis cycles for typical system-on-chip (SoC) designs. "ESL-based methodologies are finally revealing their true form," said Simon Calder, CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of SpiraTech "They are becoming a coherent collection of design automation and verification tools which embrace the spectrum of abstraction, including the Transaction Levels. Our joint development with Novas is evidence that it is possible to make great 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; verification tools even better by enhancing them with more automation and true ESL capabilities." Novas will offer SpiraTech's technology within its nESL product to automatically extract transaction information that inherently exists within system and hardware design and verification environments. Transactions will then be displayed both graphically and textually within the Novas nESL environment for debug and analysis. This visualisation can be performed dynamically during simulation using any leading Hardware Description Language (language) Hardware Description Language - (HDL) A kind of language used for the conceptual design of integrated circuits. Examples are VHDL and Verilog. (HDL (Hardware Description Language) A language used to describe the functions of an electronic circuit for documentation, simulation or logic synthesis (or all three). Although many proprietary HDLs have been developed, Verilog and VHDL are the major standards. ) or SystemC simulator, or as a post-simulation function. Transaction-based Debug Goes Mainstream Visualising and debugging IC designs at the Transaction Level has always been an attractive prospect for designers and verification engineers, and is now becoming reality in mainstream SoC and complex Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (hardware) Application-Specific Integrated Circuit - (ASIC) An integrated circuit designed to perform a particular function by defining the interconnection of a set of basic circuit building blocks drawn from a library provided by the circuit manufacturer. (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. ) development. A transaction is an abstract package of events that can represent hundreds of lower level signal or register transfers. Since almost all electronic design debug to date has been performed at the signal level, much time is spent manually collating signal value changes into the transactions of which they are constituents. "Functional verification of large SoC designs is extremely challenging with the tremendous amounts of data that must be tracked and analyzed," said Dave Kelf, vice president of marketing at Novas. "We are working with SpiraTech to streamline the process for capturing and visualizing data at the higher transaction level. By leveraging this powerful ESL technique, we can help accelerate SoC debug and provide significant productivity gains for our end users." This integration of SpiraTech's state-of-the art Cohesive transaction tool with the Novas automated debug solutions will enable designers to analyze cause-and-effect behaviors of ESL or RTL designs for a wide variety of standard protocols, without the costly effort of creating their own transaction extractors. By automating many of the tasks involved, SpiraTech facilitated rapid development of the library of protocol abstraction adaptors that will be offered with the Novas nESL product. This approach will also enable the companies to provide reliable support for proprietary protocols in a fraction of the time required by any other means, saving their mutual customers multiple man-years of internal engineering resources, as well as several months of elapsed e·lapse intr.v. e·lapsed, e·laps·ing, e·laps·es To slip by; pass: Weeks elapsed before we could start renovating. n. schedule time. Price and Availability The SpiraTech technology will be packaged as the nTE (Transaction Extractor) option for the new nESL product from Novas. U.S. list priced starting at $2,500 for one-year license, it provides a library of 10 adaptors including AMBA AMBA Area Metropolitana de Buenos Aires (Spanish) AMBA Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture AMBA American Mold Builders Association AMBA American Mustang and Burro Association AMBA Association of Master of Business Administration AHB AHB Advanced High-performance Bus AHB Assault Helicopter Battalion AHB Air Historical Branch AHB Attack Helicopter Battalion AHB Automatic Half Barriers AHB Aussie Home Brewers AHB Active Hyper Bass , AMBA AXI AXI Automated X-Ray Inspection (electronics) AXI Association Xpertise Inc (Calgary, AB, Canada) AXI Ada to X-Window System Interface , PCI Express and OCP-IP. Additionally, Novas will provide support for proprietary or other non-standard protocols on a case-by-case basis. About SpiraTech SpiraTech is the leading provider of EDA (1) (Electronic Design Automation) Using the computer to design, lay out, verify and simulate the performance of electronic circuits on a chip or printed circuit board. tools that automate the process of mixing and matching multiple levels of abstraction during the design and verification of complex silicon devices. This ability greatly enhances the productivity, applicability and accessibility of the emerging generation of Electronic System Level (ESL) EDA tools. SpiraTech is a privately owned, venture capital funded, company based in Manchester, England. About Novas Novas Software, Inc. is the leading provider of robust, tool-independent design debug systems to companies designing complex ICs, embedded processing platforms and SoCs. Novas' products dramatically reduce the time it takes for engineers to locate, isolate and solve the root causes of functional design and verification problems. Novas has been ranked first in customer satisfaction for three consecutive years in a comprehensive EDA study published by CMP CMP (cytidine monophosphate): see cytosine. (1) (CMP Media LLC, Manhasset, NY, www.cmp.com) Part of United Business Media, CMP is a leading integrated media company that offers a wide variety of publications and services in the information . There are more than 12,000 Novas systems installed worldwide by over 400 companies and 40 companies utilizing Novas technology in their products today. Novas is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. with offices in Europe, Japan and Asia-Pacific. For more information, visit www.novas.com or email info@novas.com. Cohesive is a trademark of SpiraTech. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are property of their respective owners. |
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