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Jasper Design Automation: ActiveDesign™

ActiveDesign™

Accelerate Design Development and Reuse

Ever-increasing complexity and competitive time-to-market requirements of modern SoCs have placed mounting pressure on designers to improve their productivity and deliver higher quality designs.

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, longer the lifespan of a bug, more costly are its ripple effects.

Given that traditional design and reuse solutions do not provide the essential design visibility necessary to ensure bug-free designs, costly and time-consuming design re-spins occur.

Jasper’s ActiveDesign™ drives higher RTL design quality and designer productivity, reduces verification time, accelerates knowledge transfer, improves design maintenance, and enables efficient design reuse. It delivers early RTL design for debug and verification, as well as enables exploration and reuse of legacy designs and commercial IP. ActiveDesign uses formal analysis, coupled with Jasper's patented Visualize™ technology, to automatically produce interesting waveforms from the (partially-coded) RTL. This is accomplished without the development of a testbench or any input stimulus.

ActiveDesign’s Behavioral Indexing™ technology lets engineers design, concurrently modify, and verify RTL code, then store it in a persistent database containing both the RTL itself and an “index” of its elastic behaviors.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS

	Analyze designs faster and identify potential clocks and resets with Easystart™
	Understand key behaviors early in the design phase with AutoExplore™
	Accelerate RTL development with transaction-level waveform views of design functionality with Visualize™
	Simplify debug and find interesting behaviors with QuietTrace™
	Correlate RTL, waveforms and functions to create an executable spec with Behavioral Indexing™
	Enhance incremental behavioral analysis, evolutionary RTL comparison with Implication Analysis™

ActiveDesign Flow

As shown in the ActiveDesign flow, simply provide an RTL design directory. EasyStart™ automatically identifies potential clocks and resets. RTL can be visualized early in the design cycle even without a testbench or input stimulus, enabled by the powerful Visualize™ technology. Visualize significantly speeds up design exploration fueled by understanding behaviors and root cause analysis.

For behaviors of interest, AutoExplore™ shows all the different possibilities that contribute to that specific behavior, and helps gain quick understanding of such behaviors.

Behavioral Indexing enables efficient design reuse. The Activated Design™ prepared by ActiveDesign (over the course of the design process) provides an executable specification cross-correlated to RTL. This facilitates dynamic analysis of proposed changes to the design. The automatically extracted waveforms for design behavior queries can provide definitive answers to reuse questions since signals, behaviors and assertions can be quickly visualized.

Once these behaviors are stored in the ActiveDesign database, they can be concurrently modified across multiple users and teams, multiple revisions of RTL can be visualized, and both compared with Implication Analysis™.

ActiveDesign also produces reports showing the impact of design changes on the indexed behaviors. These reports enable the designer to easily preserve desired behaviors while iteratively developing the design, or modifying it for a new use. These behaviors in the form of properties can be exported from the database to either simulation or a formal verification tool such as JasperGold®.

Accelerate Design Exploration and Reuse With ActiveDesign

ActiveDesign accelerates design development and reuse for important internal design blocks, as well as commercial IP comprehension and deployment. Correlated RTL, waveforms and behaviors form an “executable spec” for the design supporting what-if analysis and incremental design evolution.

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. Coupled with a powerful visualization and analysis system, ActiveDesign enables faster comprehension, verification, and safe design modification. It accelerates knowledge transfer within and across teams and enables efficient design reuse.