System Validation

MindCrea Ltd

DAFCA is an EDA software company focused on post-silicon SoC validation, debug, and in-system bring-up. DAFCA's tools allow design teams to seamlessly incorporate patented and compact reconfigurable instrumentation IP into their devices, pre-silicon, in order to observe, discover, and diagnose at-speed, in-silicon functional behavior.

Physical device validation and debug s the most expensive and unpredictable stage of design implementation; DAFCA tools provide on-chip visibility, which leads to dramatically lower development and integration costs. The ClearBlue™ Instrumentation Studio is a powerful, easy to use, pre-silicon environment for insertion of reconfigurable instruments directly into RTL. The ClearBlue™ Silicon Validation Studio offers a wide spectrum of in-system, at-speed analysis capabilities, including logic analyzers, event-based validation and assertion-based debug, and performance monitoring. ClearBlue™ is compatible by design with all major EDA tool flows.

Mind

Crea

Literally there is no feasible way of observing all the critical nodes of a design at real speed and operating conditions. Regression simulation can exercise out all pre-defined conditions and sequences of planned functions. However, SoC’s are built with ever increasing amount of 3rd party IP integrated with logic to the IP of a 4th party. Other risk functions are that at speed operation can change the physical conditions beyond the boundaries characterized for temperature & voltage.

Solutions building customized circuits for observing such risky areas of a design become to an overwhelming task, if not even requiring own test environment. It is requiring further effort in building efficient methodology and reuse capability for this, building unnecessary overhead in the use of expensive design resources.