ProDesign Integrates ASIC & SoC Prototyping Systems with New Novas Siloti Visibility Enhancement Product

Business Wire, March 6, 2006

SAN JOSE, Calif. & MUNICH, Germany -- New Host Controlled Debugging Tool (HCD) for CHIPit Systems Works with Novas' Siloti SilVE Product to Reduce Verification Time of Complex ICs and SoCs

ProDesign, the leading supplier of high-speed ASIC & SoC prototyping systems, announced that it is integrating its newest CHIPit Platinum V4 ASIC verification system with the Siloti(TM) Visibility Enhancement product introduced separately today by Novas Software, Inc. The integration leverages ProDesign's new HCD Tool which expands the design debugging functionality of prototyping systems. The integrated solution will provide users with very fast prototyping while enabling full internal design visibility for efficient debug.

The new CHIPit Platinum V4 is based on the latest Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA technology and equipped with the new HCD (Host Controlled Debugging) mechanism. The HCD tool allows users to have full access to the internal signal data from the FPGAs used in the scaleable CHIPit Platinum System. Together, the Novas Siloti SilVE(TM) product and the HCD tool analyze and configure the system so that only the essential register values that need to be observed are extracted during operation. That data is then expanded within the Siloti SilVE environment enabling full signal value visibility and correlated back to the original register transfer level (RTL) design description for debug with the Novas Verdi(TM) Automated Debug System. The resulting methodology provides developers of multi-million gate designs portioned over multiple FPGAs with greater observability of internal signal activity for faster verification and debug.

"We're delighted to collaborate with ProDesign to make it easier for engineers to observe and comprehend design behavior during prototype verification and validation," said Scott Sandler, president and chief executive officer of Novas. "ProDesign's CHIPit high speed verification systems and our Siloti and Verdi products help achieve this goal with new innovative technologies that provide full design visibility with minimal overhead for debugging complex problems."

"Today's generation of ASIC/SoC devices, and particularly large prototype designs containing multiple FPGAs on a single board, are becoming increasingly difficult to debug," said Gerhard Scherer, President of ProDesign Electronics Corporation. "We are excited to take our collaboration with Novas to the next level, bringing together the benefits of high speed prototyping with enhanced verification and debug. Our new HCD tool, in combination with visibility enhancement capabilities from Novas, provides a mechanism for gaining valuable insight into the operation of multi-million gate designs in the shortest possible time."

Availability

The HCD tool will be released in mid March, 2006. It will be available for CHIPit Master licenses and supports up to 21 FPGAs in a system. As all CHIPit software, the HCD tool will run on Linux, Solaris and Windows operating systems.

About CHIPit hardware-assisted verification platforms

The CHIPit line provides an integrated set of tools with debug capabilities that provide a dual solution for hardware and software verification and validation throughout the project life cycle. Based on FPGAs, modular CHIPit platforms give design engineers unprecedented speed and flexibility to validate algorithm performance, verify hardware implementation, and assist in hardware/software co-development and co-verification. The CHIPit platforms can handle capacities up to 20 million ASIC gates and run at system speeds of up to 200MHz. Over 160 CHIPit systems are installed worldwide at customers including ST Microelectronics, Philips Semiconductors, Thomson Multimedia, Sony Semiconductors and many more.

About the HCD (Host Controlled Debugging) Tool

The HCD tool allows users to pull out register values from the system during specific time windows and to write them into a signal file. Support for the industry-standard Value Change Dump (VCD) format ensures compatibility with many third-party tools, while planned support for Novas' widely-used Fast Signal Database (FSDB) format will provide optimal integration with the Novas Siloti(TM) and Verdi(TM) products. With complete access to all FPGAs in the CHIPit Platinum system, the HCD tool gives the user full control over the system clock and resets, and the ability to automatically buffer register data into CHIPit memory or directly write the data to the appropriate file on the host side.

About ProDesign

Founded in 1981 and privately held, ProDesign and has over 80 employees, with facilities for research, design, and sales in Germany, France and the U.S. The company's CHIPit family of hardware-assisted verification tools to validate algorithm performance, verify hardware implementation, and assist in hardware/software co-development and co-verification to reduce the verification time dramatically.

For more information about the company's prototyping products, please visit: http://www.uchipit.com.