Novas introduces on-the-fly debugging
By Michael Santarini, Senior Editor -- EDN, March 10, 2006
Novas Software officials hope that the company’s new product for on-the-fly debugging of IC code will prove to be as big a hit in the market as its Debussy and Verdi products are. Novas President and Chief Executive Officer Scott Sandler says the new offering, Siloti, allows Novas debugging tools to dump signals on the fly during simulation and emulation without stopping the simulation or emulation. In today’s SOC (system-on-chip) verification environments, it is inconvenient and time-consuming to start and stop simulations and emulations to get signal dumps to run a debugger.
Siloti addresses this issue by taking what amounts to essential registers from the code on the fly to help the Debussy and Verdi tools get full visibility into signal behavior without halting simulation runs. Novas offers Siloti SimVE for simulation environments and Siloti SilVE for emulation, prototyping, and silicon debugging. The company claims that, for early customers of Siloti, the product provides a fourfold decrease in debugging with hardware emulation and improves design visibility fivefold when users deploy it with a design-for-debugging methodology, in which RTL designers identify critical signals before performing simulations. Before designers simulate a design, they feed RTL or gate-level source code to Siloti. The tool then analyzes the code to determine which registers need to provide full visibility.
In an emulation environment, the SilVE tool performs sampling and analysis, signal expansion, and subsequent debugging of the design code rather than on the netlist of the FPGA or FPGAs on which the design is running. Sandler says Siloti expands only the sections that users want to examine, which means the simulator or emulator needs to dump just those parts of a file a user wants to examine. The Siloti SilVE and SimVE each start at $65,000 for one-year subscription.
