Design

Debug platform is 50% faster than competing devices

29th April 2015
Siobhan O'Gorman
0

A debugging solution which reduces the time to identify bugs in a design by up to 50% compared to traditional signal- or transaction-level debug methods has been released by Cadence Design Systems. In addition to the Indago debug platform, the company has also introduced three debugging apps that plug into the platform and can be used with other verification tools to provide a single integrated and synchronised debug solution for testbench, verification IP (VIP) and hardware/software debug for SoC designs. The Indago debug platform and debugging apps are part of the comprehensive Cadence System Development Suite and are currently available for early adopters.

With its patented root-cause analysis technology, the platform filters unneeded data to go beyond the source for a single bug to resolve the cause of all related bugs. Current debug methodologies used by designers require multiple simulation iterations to incrementally extract data points that ultimately point to the source of the bug. The technology in the Indago debug platform can reduce the human time necessary to resolve schedule-impacting bugs by up to 50% using a common set of resources that enable a suite of commercial and user-created apps that automate the analysis of data from multiple verification engines and multiple vendors.

With a unified debug platform and the debug apps, the platform enables multiple engineering specialists from design, testbench, embedded software and protocol verification to operate as a team to resolve SoC bugs. The three debug apps include the Indago Debug Analyzer, the Indago Embedded Software Debug and the Indago Protocol Debug. The debug analyser extends root-cause analysis from e testbench (IEEE 1647) to SystemVerilog (IEEE 1800) and increases performance by up to 10 times. The embedded software debug resolves bugs associated with embedded software applications by synchronising software and hardware source code debug, while the protocol debug visualises advanced protocols such as DDR4, ARM AMBA AXI and ACE using Cadence VIP for intuitive debugging.

“Achieving high-quality metrics for Bosch’s advanced mixed-signal MEMS sensors requires us to identify and resolve bugs quickly within a massive volume of verification data,” said Robert Richter, Senior Expert, ASIC Development, Bosch. “Cadence’s Indago Debug Analyzer App has improved our debug productivity up to 50% because it helps us find the root cause of the bugs faster with features like reverse debugging. We believe the Indago debug platform will enable us to continue to deliver for applications including consumer electronics, fitness tracking, wearables and IoT.”

“Leading-edge verification projects create terabytes of data every day, making debug a big data problem for semiconductor and system companies,” commented Andy Eliopoulos, Vice President, Research and Development, Advanced Verification Solutions, Cadence. “With the Indago debug platform, Cadence helps solve this problem by automating the process of finding the root cause for a bug. For the first time, engineers can have a collaborative environment across multiple verification engines that both reduces the time to solve the discovered bug and the root cause for other bugs that may be buried in the data.”

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