Vennsa Technologies Moves Beyond Debug with OnPoint 2.0

“OnPoint 2.0 is a major release for Vennsa, incorporating two years’ worth of designer feedback,” says Dr. Andreas Veneris, Vennsa’s president and chief executive officer. “With this breakthrough release, the tedious, manual and time-consuming backward debugging process becomes sharply faster and much more intuitive.”

According to most technology roadmaps, functional debugging accounts for approximately 60% of the verification effort. When a failure occurs, the engineer typically dumps debug messages and simulation traces, and loads waveform and structural circuit viewers to trace signals backward from the failure points. This entails looking up signal values in the waveform, jumping to the driving signals and statements in source code, and speculating whether suspect pieces of source code are responsible for the error.

Engineers periodically take guesses and start to engage in a forward way of thinking by postulating if changes in suspect signal values can fix the erroneous behavior of the design. If the guesses are not successful, they revert back to the time-consuming back-tracing debug process to discover more potential root-causes for the error.

OnPoint 2.0 automates the manual back-tracing debugging task and introduces advanced causality analysis automation to guide the forward thinking step to reduce the bug localization and fixing effort.

It performs root cause analysis of a failure by leveraging complex algorithms and advanced mathematical models. Within minutes and with the push of a button, OnPoint returns all suspect signals, statements and other constructs that can undergo a functional change to correct the failure. It also bins those suspects into a handful of groups based on paths the error takes to failure points.

For each suspect, the tool suggests fixes for new logic signal values that can propagate through the circuit to remedy the buggy behavior. This allows designers to immediately apply a forward design-like way of thinking because they are presented with all necessary information to pose questions about how to fix the error.

OnPoint 2.0 includes increased capacity up to the sub-system level and debugging of error traces of thousands of cycles. It supports Verilog, SystemVerilog and VHDL, SystemVerilog and PSL assertions and the Open Verification Library. OnPoint is integrated with most simulation and formal tools as well as verification intellectual property blocks.

OnPoint 2.0 is shipping now. Pricing is available upon request.