Sunday, December 13, 2009

Our NuSym updates from DAC and around..

Some of you might have seen our report of DAC from John Cooley. Here is our full version of NuSym report for those interested. Trek to follow (wiht more updates after the DAC report was sent out)..

We at CVC have been tracking Nusym's technology for a while. I visited their booth & demo and here are our (mine combined with my CTO's inputs) comments/impressions. While the generation of additional tests/filling holes is a critical piece of its features, I believe the coverage analysis feature is not so well published/well understood.

With our customers who are serious about coverage, the analysis of coverage holes has been one of the biggest pains. The sad part is no major EDA vendor is really adding features to enhance that, with Nusym addressing that problem, it is certainly very useful. The techniques they showed in their slides/demo are not truly path breaking but simple ones that can aid in not wasting time with unreachable coverage holes. It is that simplicity that made me very interested in their stuff. But it is unclear if the tool can go beyond the "static analysis" part and offer more sophisticated means to analyze/exclude coverage holes.

While the major EDA vendors claim to address this challenge, much is yet to be done with say minor changes to RTL, then the whole analysis goes invalid and has to be repeated - much manually. It will be great if Nusym can address that.

The other not-so-much-spoken feature is their "replay" technique - perhaps it is still maturing, but sure enough it is one of those very useful techniques in regression runs.

Thanks and Regards,

Shalini Pandey

CVC Pvt Ltd

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