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ActiveDesign™ with Behavioral Indexing™ |
Dramatic Breakthroughs in Design Comprehension Increase Baseline Design Quality |
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OVERVIEW
Jasper Design Automation, provider of the most advanced formal technology solutions available today, introduces ActiveDesign with Behavioral Indexing™ to drive higher RTL design quality and designer productivity, reduce verification time, accelerate knowledge transfer, improve design maintenance, and enable efficient design reuse.
Until now, the ever-increasing complexities and short time-to-market requirements of modern SoCs, has been placing mounting pressure on designers to improve their productivity and deliver higher quality designs. RTL design, however, is a highly iterative process of coding layers of design functionality and making design decisions at every turn. Given all the layered dependencies, one wrong design decision can easily introduce bugs, causing designers to fall short of the quality imperative. Consequently, the design burden is passed along to the functional verification team. Given that traditional verification solutions do not provide the essential design visibility and comprehension necessary to ensure bug-free designs, costly and time-consuming design re-spins inevitably occur.
The often quoted industry statistic stating that 70% of the development cycle is spent in verification is really the process of getting out the bugs that designers inadvertently coded into the RTL. Pushing bug-finding responsibility to the verification team dictates that most bugs will not be found until a critical mass of RTL (usually from multiple designers) and testbench code (developed by the verification engineer) has been integrated and debugged. Unfortunately, the longer the lifespan of a bug, the more costly are its ripple effects.
When a bug has a lifespan of weeks or months, new code is developed on top of the buggy code, creating layered dependencies that are difficult to repair. The later a bug is found in the development cycle, the longer it will take to debug its root cause. This is the case because the code is no longer fresh in the RTL designer's mind. Regrettably, a single bug can manifest itself in dozens, or even hundreds of simulation failures, each requiring investigation and closure.
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Bugs that go undetected until late in the physical design cycle can cause massive rework. The most costly bugs escape
to silicon, and may not be discovered until another design team reuses the legacy RTL. Today, sophisticated teams
track the lifespan of every bug and strive to reduce the average. Clearly, designers are in the best position to
eliminate bugs in their infancy - and to reduce the chances of creating bugs in the first place.
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Iterative behavior indexing with ActiveDesign |
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| BENEFITS |
- User-friendly ActiveDesign delivers dramatic breakthroughs in design comprehension that drive higher RTL design quality and greater designer productivity
- Reduces life cycle design costs and verification time
- Accelerates knowledge transfer and enables efficient design reuse
- Complementary with all existing design flows and accepts RTL designs in SystemVerilog, Verilog, or VHDL
- Using under-the-hood formal technology, waveform representations of design behaviors are automatically produced without a testbench or simulator
- Users can also refine the waveforms directly to describe desired behavior
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| FEATURES |
- Cross-correlation of RTL, waveforms, and natural language descriptions
- Extraction of waveforms from design behavior queries
- Live annotation of activities within waveforms
- Implication analys™ is to isolate the impact of design changes
- Accelerators for fast waveform generations
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HOW IT WORKS
ActiveDesign uses formal analysis, coupled with Jasper's patented visualization technology, to automatically produce interesting waveforms from the (partially-coded) RTL itself. This is accomplished without the development of a testbench. Using ActiveDesign, designers can get immediate feedback on functions that interest them.
With ActiveDesign, good design behavior can be visually confirmed by the designer, and the designer can also see unintended consequences of their design decisions - all on the waveform. After starting from a specification, most designers create a mental image of the scenario they are trying to create when coding their RTL. Using ActiveDesign, designers can visually confirm that the RTL they create will produce the target behaviors. In addition, designers can expose unwanted side effects and implications. In this way, users of ActiveDesign can alter their design decisions as they design.
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ActiveDesign communicates in the common language of the designers: waveforms |
ActiveDesign is used to confirm and index intended functional behaviors as the RTL is composed, and to easily validate complex, sometimes unintended, interactions among behaviors. This use mode is sometimes referred to as a "Designer Self Test." The powerful comprehension features in ActiveDesign, enabled by Behavioral Indexing technology from Jasper, help designers and verification engineers that 'inherit' a design to become intimately familiar with relevant design functionality, without any access to the original design author. Activated Designs empower any user over the life of the design, or its derivatives, to comprehend, safely modify, and retarget the RTL design for new uses.
It is ActiveDesign's Behavioral Indexing capabilities that enable efficient design reuse. The Activated Design prepared by the designer over the course of the design process, provides an executable specification cross-correlated to RTL to facilitate dynamic analysis of proposed uses and/or changes to the design. The automatically-extracted waveforms for design behavior queries can be used to provide definitive answers to reuse questions, eliminating the need for any simulator or testbench development.
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A first-of-its-kind EDA solution for behavior-based RTL analysis and verification by designers, ActiveDesign iteratively extracts, indexes, and stores design behaviors in an executable database called an Activated Design™. Coupled with a powerful analysis system, ActiveDesign enables faster comprehension, verification, and safe design modification. By indexing relevant design behaviors in a database, ActiveDesign enables dynamic behavior-based analysis and correlation of functional behaviors to the evolving RTL. The user runs "implication analysis™" which automatically produces reports to show the impact of design changes on the indexed behaviors, classifying the behaviors as "unaffected", "potentially affected" (temporally changed), or "broken". These reports enable the designer to easily preserve desired behaviors while iteratively developing the design, or modifying it for a new use.
For further details, please call your local Jasper sales office, or visit the Jasper website at: http://www.jasper-da.com.
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