Gate-level debugger is easy to customise

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Jun 17, 2005

GateVision Pro is a high-performance gate-level debugging tool that offers an open API that allows chip designers to customise and implement their own debugging functions.

New from Concept Engineering, GateVision Pro is a gate-level debugging tool that offers higher performance and an open application programming interface (API) that allows chip designers to customise and implement their own debugging functions.

In addition, a new 64 bit database provides higher capacity, giving chip design teams the ability to debug large, complex chips.

"The higher complexity of today's chips has created the need for debugging tools with higher performance and capacity", said Gerhard Angst, Concept Engineering CEO.

"GateVision Pro offers our customers many ways to solve problems in their existing design flows, and brings gate-level debugging to the next level".

GateVision Pro fits easily into any design flow where Verilog and EDIF netlist formats are being used.

The new product gives designers of integrated circuits (ICs), systems-on-chip (SoCs), intellectual property (IP) blocks and complex field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) full access to the chip database.

Such a capability is useful for integrating GateVision Pro into different design flows, as well as for writing custom electrical rule checkers (ERC), report functions, and data consistency checks.

Designers can also visualise information from side files within GateVision Pro schematics.

"To verify our high end chips we needed a very special custom extraction method to find and isolate certain critical paths within our designs", said Masami Kinoshita, Executive Professional of DA Technology Gr at Elpida Memory (Tokyo, Japan).

"Based on the customisable path extraction engine in GateVision Pro, we were able to automatically extract these paths and improve error coverage in our verification flow".

Debugging features - such as schematic view, schematic fragment view, source code probing, hierarchy tree view and object search view - enable designers to quickly understand, optimise and debug complex chips.

GateVision Pro is available now.