( ESNUG 409 Item 6 ) -------------------------------------------- [03/25/03]
Subject: ( ESNUG 393 #8 ) Didn't Buy Debussy; But We Liked Denali PureView
> Undertow Suite can do exactly what Novas does and for less than 1/4 the
> cost. What a totally unnecessary and major financial burden it is to have
> to purchase tools for every engineering team member that cost $25,000+,
> just in order to trace signals back on your RTL or gate designs.
>
> - Bob Schopmeyer
> Veritools, Inc.
From: Daniel Abate <wolfpack=mc thought guam wolf=dabate>
Hello John,
We looked at Debussy, but ended up using the waveform viewer that came with
our simulators. One thing I really liked about Debussy, that I haven't
seen in other waveform viewers, is a nice integration to Denali's PureView
Memory debugging tool. We are designing a custom ASIC (a Rapid I/O based
multi-processor compute system) with +2G of DDR-SDRAM memory, and use
PureView to view the memory data/transactions during simulation. Denali's
'system memory' feature lets us organize our DDR memory models into a single
contiguous address space, and using PureView, we then have access to a
detailed memory transaction history, and a view of the system memory
contents during simulation. It's pretty valuable to be able use a backdoor
into memory for snooping reads/writes, loading large memory images, and
injecting random errors - not to mention the graphical stuff. We save a ton
of time by snooping memory data, setting assertions on memory transactions,
etc. I wish there more debug solutions using these methods; and I can see
a tight integration with Denali MMAV/PureView becoming more of a key issue
in debug/verification tool selection.
- Daniel Abate
Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. Chelmsford, MA
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