( DAC 01 Item 3 ) ---------------------------------------------- [ 7/31/01 ]
Subject: Atrenta SpyGlass, SureLint, TransEDA, VeriLint, Veritools, Leda
ONE CROWDED PARTY: This year's crop of linters aren't really all that new.
People are still pissed at Avanti for buying and subsequently grossly
jacking up the price of VeriLint and are eager for cheaper substitutes like
Veritools' HDL-Lint. TransEDA's VN-Check and Verisity's SureCov/SureLint
done well, but the big noisey new kid on the block is Atrenta's SpyGlass.
(SpyGlass was selling itself as a supposed "super linter".)
"We had Avanti's Novas VeriLint and I really wonder about Avanti.
They seem to have destroyed it's value or should I say over value.
We converted to TransEDA and are quite happy."
- Phil Kuglin, Credence Systems Corp.
"TransEDA VN-Check
-----------------
TransEDA has an RTL rule checker called VN-Check, which is available as
part of the Verification Navigator integrated environment.
- Carina Chiang of Agilent
"We have Avanti's Novas, bought back in 1998 as Verilint. It was
worth the couple grand we paid for it. The TransEDA tool looks
like the best shot if I were buying today -- lots of pre-made rules,
easy GUI for setting up what to check on a particular design,
ability to add your own rules to impose coding standards."
- Jeff Deutch, Avici Systems
"For functional sims, the testbenches are VHDL and the netlist Verilog.
For vector sims (scan, etc), we use 100% Verilog. We use TransEDA in
one group to check coverage and this seems to work well."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Re: RTL coverage tools, TI's used TransEDA tool with great success. We
used it to Pareto regression tests - ie. 20% of the tests get 80% of
the coverage, thus speeding up basic regressions."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"I think TransEDA is in a different league then the others. For
coverage, no one can beat them. We are about to do an evaluation soon
and I am keen to use their tools."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"For lint tools, we evaluated several options, and ultimately purchased
Avanti's ExploreRTL / Nova-VHDLLint, as well as the more traditional
batch Verilint, around the end of 2000. We are generally satisfied
with both. TransEda VN-Check was found to be extremely slow (java
based) and failed to parse our design files. Veritools HDLLint was
found to have serious limitations for VHDL - no elaboration step
(could not handle generics, for example), did not distinguish between
VHDL 87 and VHDL 93, and failed to parse many standard VHDL constructs.
Synopsys Pro-VHDL had a powerful enviroment for developing customized
checks - but the supplied checks were limited to RMM and coding style,
and some were incorrectly implemented.
For code coverage we use TransEda Verification Navigator, which works
well with VHDL and mixed language. Back when I was looking at
alternatives, most simply did not support VHDL."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"TransEDA:
TransEDA continues to sell their VHDL and Verilog code coverage tools.
Personal opinion - these may be the easiest tools ever created. The
importance of that depends on how many different tools your designers
are expected to know (are they "short fat engineers" or are they "tall
skinny engineers"?)"
- John Weiland, Intrinsix
"Veritools
Their products are HDLLint, the Undertow Waveform viewer/debugging
suite, and a systemC-language rtl simulator called SuperC which works
with Undertow. The Undertow product has some neat, new state machine
diagramming abilities, plus a bunch of other features that are in
Debussy and even in Virsim. The weird thing is, we are not sure that
it supports VPD dump file formats, which might explain why they offer
a free simulator along with it. We used HDLLint at [ company
deleted ], because it was much cheaper than Verilint but did the same
thing. All the tools run on both Linux and Solaris."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"I was happy with Verilint before Avanti bought it and raised the
prices. I have looked at Veritools HDL-Lint, Debussy nLint and
Verisity's Surelint but that was a while ago and they are constantly
being updated. For price, I liked Veritools, but it was too new at
the time and not production ready. I think each user has to look
at these tools and decide what categories of checks are important
to them and buy accordingly. In my experience, they all provided
the basic checks pretty much the same, but each had their
strongpoints."
- Tom Loftus, Intrinsix
"We're also using HDL-lint, and it seems good, though all those linters
seem the same."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"We have been a little disappointed in NC as *several* of our chips have
had to revert to XL to avoid defects in NC. We have used HDL-Lint and
liked it."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Verisity's SureLint?
I read somewhere that SureLint is the market leader. Crazy - they have
a UDC (User defined Check) which works through PLI (VPI - PLI 2.0).
Sometime back I was thinking about developing such a lint tool (which
works via PLI) for FREE. We all know how much limited is such a
mechanism for linting (for instance if I want to say a rule like all
always blocks should have a label or don't use posedge & negedge in a
design etc. - I think it is next to impossible to do it via PLI-UDC).
Avanti's Novas? Very expensive.
Veritools' HDL-Lint?
Yet to see it, but sounds like a cheaper (cheapest ?) alternative."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"I further evalled and got to drive the demos of many additional lint
tools at DAC (Nlint by Novas, VeriLint, Veritools lint, lint by Maxmim
or Maximus, TransEda lint, Spyglass, probably one or two more.) Some
claimed to be more than linters (aka Spyglass, but that had no checks.)
Most have a decent GUI and lots of checks. The better ones have USER
definable checks written in Perl, FSM Detection and race detection.
All but Surelint from Verisity fall down in the filtering area. Most
only have pragmas or global enable disable for checks. Only Surelint
has per module filters, per instance filters and the spreadsheet like
filter with wildcards. Overall it appears the Surelint is the definite
leader at the moment in lint tool features and functions especially in
filtering where it matters most. As far as I could tell their feature
set surpassed all others."
- Sean Smith of Cisco Systems
"The Verisity coverage/SureCov folks were hanging out in the Synopsys
booth a *lot*. Everytime they would see me demo-ing to customers, they
would send someone over! (It got annoying after a while, but hey what
can you do!?) Anyways, we're putting our code coverage tool into our
Verilog simulator VCS. Pretty much there will be full blown integrated
code coverege in VCS by the fall. This is making the Surefire/Verisity
folks quite nervous."
- [ A Synopsys Employee ]
"* Verisity has merged SureCov and Specman Elite into a very nice common
interface."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Synopsys RTL-DRC capabilities are worthless since they are very basic
and not configurable, e.g. I want to define which buses go to
tristates and hence need decode protection."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"I've been evaluating linting tools. SureLint is pretty easy to use,
moreso than ProVerilog(LEDA) but every parser seems to have its
quirks with respect to Verilog."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"1.1 Linters
Synopsys bought the French company Leda and is now selling their
VHDL/Verilog linters (at much higher prices). It comes with rules for
the RMM (Reuse Methodology Manual), synthesis, etc. Many linters are
programmable. Theirs uses a really obscure language, but it is
apparently appropriate for the task because a lot of people are
writing rules for it, including Xilinx and Altera. Don't know if it's
becoming a de facto standard.
Not to pick solely on Synopsys, when Avanti bought Verilint (basically
the industry standard, at least at that time) Avanti also bumped the
price way up. They initially charged more for the GUI version than the
textual, batch mode version, until they realized that dozens of
designers could use a single batch version license but would need
multiple licenses if they were using a GUI. Now the GUI version is
cheaper.
Dualsoft was purchased by TransEDA. They make VHDL and Verilog linters.
They have rule sets for RMM, synthesis, DFT and translatability between
VHDL and Verilog - only one I of know of with the last two items. They
are programmable.
Verisity sells a Verilog linter that comes with RMM rules. It is
programmable in C and perl. They say their race detection is
especially good.
Williamette, who is known for HDL training, now sells a SystemC linter.
Novas sells a linter (I think it's part of Debussy). It has RMM rules
but is not programmable.
Atrenta is a spin-off from Interra, and sells their Spyglass tool,
which some people call a "super linter". It actually synthesizes the
code it's checking into a generic netlist, which they say allows them
to do checks that are impossible for a normal linter. Ralph Marlett is
creating DFT linting for them, so I'm sure it will be good."
- John Weiland, Intrinsix
"We have looked at Novas and like their tools, but they are over priced
(more power to them). We are linting on our new projects now. We use
Leda and have been pretty satisfied. However, we are still looking at
Spyglass and may move to it yet, especially if their DFT RTL checking
proves useful. We like the customization ease of use in Leda, although
Spyglass customization looks more flexible(and harder to learn and
support). We have looked at Nova RTL Explore from Avanti, but last
time we looked their customization was not available. I was pissed at
too many delays and we have looked again (yet)."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Atrenta Spyglass
----------------
Spyglass is an RTL rule checker that offers the standard RTL checks
and also supports customizable rule creation using Perl or C.
Spyglass can analyze either Verilog or VHDL.
Spyglass seems to be the industry-leader for RTL rule checking.
They've got some talented people leading the company, and seem to be
heading in the right direction. Atrenta is working with EDA vendors
to create rule decks to check whether the RTL will work smoothly with
the downstream implementation and analysis tools.
We've been using Spyglass and writing rules for several months. With
Atrenta's recently announced round of funding, I expect they'll be able
allocate resources to smooth some of the rough edges that can be found
at any start-up.
Atrenta has recently improved the Spyglass documentation quite a bit."
- Carina Chiang of Agilent
"Atrenta (formerly Interra) Spyglass was a total joke when I evaluated
it last year. Runtimes were 100x slower than any other linter we
evaluated. On a 30 Kgate block I benchmarked it as taking ~1.5 min
per rule over a ruleset with >300 rules. Their PERL interface was so
primitive you could simply forget about it. Didn't even bother to
benchmark its speed. Support was a bad joke."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"There is new class of lint type tools, though, that are "hybrid" lint,
formal checking, and HDL timing analysis tools -- but they lack the
basic 1500 checks found in the static HDL linters. These hybrids
didn't seem to have the features functions found in the standalone
formal model checkers, linters, and HDL floor planning/timing analysis
tools. Spyglass with its "look ahead" technology was an example of
this hybrid type. They're shipping a product but basically all they
have is a framework which can be extended by them or vendors providing
different libraries and very few checks actually included. Maybe this
technology will become more interesting in the future but at the moment
all these hybrids look weak and were frameworks only looking for
supporters."
- Sean Smith of Cisco Systems
"We have purchased Atentra's Spyglass for design rule checking. We see
this type of tool as potentially valuable to catch hazards early in
the design."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Other discussions I had included Spyglass from Atrenta. Keep an eye on
its ability to expand the scope of what has been traditionally a Lint
Checker. Many more customizable rules that can expand your ability to
enforce a methodology in your project, or across your company."
- Yatin Trivedi, Intrinsix
"I looked at Atrenta Spyglass. It looks like a legitimate tool, but I
am uncertain there is sufficient value added over lint checks we are
now doing to justify an annual $50k subscription price."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Spyglass is a joke."
- Sean Smith, Cisco Systems
"I looked at SpyGlass. I didn't get it. Marketing message seems a
little muddled. I don't see what it would really offer our design
group. Probably helps more in large design organizations where
you're coordinating the effort of hundreds of people across multiple
sites."
- Kris Monsen of Mobilygen Corp.
"The Atrenta's SpyGlass was what really caught my eye -- I also didn't
know that we had already engaged with them. With their next release it
looks like they are going to give SynTest's RTL DFT tool a run for it's
money. We desperately need something more than just a lint tool that's
on steroids like ExploreRTL from Avanti. We need something that has
some intelligence and is easily programmable. We probably won't be
able to use something like this for 6-9 months, but looks promising."
- Duncan Halstead, LSI Logic
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