( 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