Novas, Verplex and Versity tweak verification solutions

Verdi adds mathemati cal analysis, temporal visualization and symbolic exploration to Debussy's existing capabilities, the company said. Users can see the behavior of a design over time in flow graphs, and can investigate alternative behavior.

"We believe, and our extensive beta efforts validate, that this is the most significant enhancement in debugging since the introduction of waveform displays," said Yu-Chin Hsu, vice president of research and development for Novas.

Verdi's behavior analysis automatically infers the logic functions of a design from RTL or gate-level descriptions, and interprets simulation results to generate an internal model of design behavior. Visualization capabilities isolate active logic paths, automatically trace signals back through time, and show how control and data flow through the design. Symbolic design exploration allows "what-if" analyses and lets users explore the effects of different values, or source code changes, on design behavior.

Verdi is available in July on Unix or Linux platforms starting at $14,000 for an annual subscription license. Debussy users can upgrade to Verdi, the company said.

Meanwhile, Verplex Systems is extending its formal verification technology throughout the design flow. An upcoming version of its Conformal LEC equivalence checker, called Conformal LVR, will run verification from the register-transfer level to final layout-versus-schematic descriptions.

Conformal LVR lets users compare RTL "golden" designs to final layouts. This capability works for blocks including memory, compiled datapath, memory control, intellectual property cores, complex I/O, and full-custom logic.

Verplex has also added support for complex arithmetic operators compiled from high-level descriptions. The company also claims to have improved the speed and capacity of its proof engines for RTL designs, with some blocks running five to ten times faster. Further, Verplex claims better performance during graphical deb ugging, and extended support for the Verilog 2001 standard.

Conformal LVR will be available in the third quarter starting at $130,000 on Hewlett-Packard, Sun and Linux platforms. Support for complex, compiled arithmetic operators will be available in the third quarter as an additional Conformal option.

Verisity is announcing the immediate availability of Specman Elite version 4. The company promises a 27 percent average speed improvement for compiled mode and a 15 percent improvement for interpreted mode over earlier versions.

The latest version also adds new coverage features. These include an integration with Verisity's SureCove code coverage product. Also new are coverage-per-instance, which lets users measure and compare coverage of different instances of individual objects; coverage extensibility, which makes it easier to define and add to the desired coverage base; and coverage test ranking, which enables users to determine which tests give a high degree of coverage per unit of simulation time.

Specman Elite 4 is available now on Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux workstations, priced at $50,000 for a floating license.