Tool helps design reuse
By Gabe Moretti -- EDN, January 8, 2004
Designers often lose design knowledge because of unstructured documentation processes and the widening gap across time and distance within distributed-design organizations. Legacy designs or third-party IP (intellectual-property) blocks can be especially difficult to understand because of limited access to the original designers. The ability to transfer design and integration knowledge with third-party IP is essential to successful integration and to the growth of the IP market itself.
To alleviate these documentation problems, Novas Software has introduced Reusner Design Knowledge Publisher and a “smart-reuse” methodology that enables design and verification engineers to automatically extract, capture, and convey their understanding of design behavior. The technique allows design teams to electronically publish design knowledge for debugging and product documentation. The company based the product on the same architecture as its core debugging systems. In addition, Reusner uses a new visualization engine that drives the generation of documentation-quality block diagrams, schematics, and finite-state-machine diagrams. The topology-driven visualization engine has built-in synchronization control to ensure that the design views are always current.
Reusner’s knowledge-publishing process commences with the automatic creation of graphical views from Verilog, VHDL, and mixed-language designs. Designers extract knowledge directly from the source code to produce design views. Designers can interactively edit the views by rearranging the size and location of components and their ports, rerouting connections, and annotating them with textual information. The views are available for interactive debugging with Novas’ behavior-based Verdi and Debussy debugging systems. Engineers can trace design connectivity within the saved views and use drag-and-drop features to access information in other views, such as the source code for any block or the waveform for any signal. They can also annotate simulation results directly into the views.
The product is available as an option to either the Verdi or the Debussy debugging system. The price is $10,000 for a one-year, time-based license. Verdi and Debussy customers can access read-only Reusner design views for no additional charge.
Novas, 1-408-467-7888, www.novas.com.
