Sunday, March 7, 2010

Identifying transactions faster with Verdi

Further to our previous blog entry on Verdi’s advanced Transaction debug features (ref: http://www.cvcblr.com/blog/?p=130 ), here are some more tricks that can help debug automation even further.

 

Very often designers find that there are certain unique characteristics/attributes that differentiate transactions. For instance Transaction kind being ERROR/SPLIT/RETRY etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if on a 50,000 clock cycle simulation dump one can:

  • Quickly identify the “information” from “raw data” of signal toggles? (see: http://www.cvcblr.com/blog/?p=130)
  • On top of previous item, classify the transactions based on user specified “attributes/fields” such as ERROR/SPLIT/RETRY

This is very handy trick with Verdi. Select Message –> Filter/Colorify as in screenshot below:

 

verdi_how_2_color

 

Once you are there, define the attributes in the dialog/pane as shown below:

verdi_how_2_color_2

 

Voila! You get:

verdi_colour

 

Add with the signals involved:

verdi_colour_show

 

Now, that’s true “debug automation” and “raising debug abstraction level” in pragmatic sense!

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