CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
28 February 2005
Product News
SpiraTech, Novas Collaborate to Deliver Powerful Transaction-Based Debug Solution
SpiraTech, Ltd., a pioneer in mixed abstraction verification, and Novas Software, Inc. jointly announced they have entered into an OEM agreement. SpiraTech's CohesiveT technology will supply transaction capture and generation technology for Novas' new nESLTM 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 visualization 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 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 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 visualization can be performed dynamically during simulation using any leading Hardware Description Language (HDL) or SystemC simulator, or as a post-simulation function.
Visualizing 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 (ASIC) 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 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 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 AHB, AMBA AXI, PCI Express and OCP-IP. Additionally, Novas will provide support for proprietary or other non-standard protocols on a case-by-case basis.
SpiraTech is a provider of EDA 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.
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