CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
12 December 2005
Implementation Investments
eSilicon Accelerates Design Cycles with Novas Verdi Debug System
Novas Software, Inc. announced that eSilicon Corporation, a leading fabless supplier of custom integrated circuits (IC), has adopted the Novas VerdiT Automated Debug System as an integral component of its sophisticated electronic design automation (EDA) flow. The advanced debugging solution has been successfully deployed by eSilicon® design centers to accelerate the development cycles of multiple IC designs.
eSilicon typically receives design specifications from its customers and manages the implementation flow, starting at either the gate or register transfer level (RTL) and seeing the design through Design for Test (DFT), place-and-route and manufacturing. Using the intuitive visualization and analysis capabilities of the Verdi system, eSilicon engineers are able to navigate the details of complex DFT architectures, and gain in-depth insight into the design intent. This helps to keep debug iterations short and improves the overall productivity of eSilicon's distributed engineering teams.
"The nature of our business requires that we cycle projects through our design centers as quickly as possible. These complex chips often come to us containing design elements from several sources and with multiple IP cores. We then add high fault coverage DFT logic that touches every IO, memory, and flip-flop in the design," said Joe Reynick, director of DFT and EDA solutions at eSilicon. "Novas' Verdi system provides the ability to quickly trace and analyze the causes of complex DFT issues, saving valuable time and effort. The end result is higher quality designs for hand-off to manufacturing. Since we use tools from a variety of EDA suppliers, we also appreciate how easily the Novas debug platform integrates into our state-of-the-art design flows."
eSilicon, http://www.esilicon.com , has chip design and manufacturing teams around the world performing custom design work for a wide range of electronics companies, involving products such as high-volume MP3 players, home gateways, complex storage networks, and high-speed communications devices.
"eSilicon's design teams face many of the most difficult challenges in IC design today. The fact that their business model is based on working with chip specifications that are not their own further underscores the importance of being able to comprehend unfamiliar designs," said Scott Sandler, president and CEO at Novas. "We are pleased to see eSilicon's engineers utilize Verdi's highly automated debug approach to get high quality chip designs into manufacturing faster for their impressive portfolio of customers."
Verdi is a complete mixed-language debug system that automates the process of understanding how complex IC and system-on-chip designs work or why they do not. It provides a universal debug platform and common interface for accessing all the design knowledge and analysis engines needed throughout the verification tool and methodology flow. Engineers can analyze cause-and-effect relationships and visualize design behavior over time to better understand and accelerate debug of third-party intellectual property, legacy design code and new or unfamiliar components.
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