Simplify Your FPGA Verification- New Tool For Comprehensive Debugging
Time and effort spent on FPGA debug and verification is already considerably high and increasing rapidly. The complexity of today’s FPGA device has increasingly grown, the quantity of designs making it challenging to leverage the in-hardware testing approach. At the same time, a fierce competition is shrinking time to market necessities.  This makes it difficult for designers to use the legacy approach of implement and test designs in hardware. While most FPGA Verification Tools provide solutions for the basic simulation to adequately support their low-density devices, these tools lack the powerful debugging and verification needed to allow designers to be competitive in meeting schedules and efficiently debugging large scale FPGAs.
Agnisys has recently added tools to explore data flow and connectivity in FPGA designs, including X-value detector and code coverage to enable FPGA designs a comprehensive debugging environment. Monitoring unknown values during simulation is a time challenging task, especially when simulation runs for an extended amount of time. In a usual scenario, any unknown values that appear during the simulation will propagate through the design and will be visible at the end of the simulation. X-Trace is the debugging tool that allows designers to detect and report unknown values right when they emerge during simulation. It reports unexpected values, signals and the time when those values were detected, providing designer more time to fix the actual issue rather than searching for it.
The latest FPGAs can support designs with more than 20 million equivalent gates, plus processor platforms and a range of communications, digital signal processing (DSP), and other useful blocks. These devices are a far from the simple programmable chips of the past, where a designer could quickly load a few thousand gates of logic into an FPGA and directly see them run. Today's devices require a comprehensive verification strategy every bit as exhaustive as that for an ASIC.
With FPGA technology improvements, more advanced design techniques were inevitable. Similar to ASIC design, the use of hardware description languages (HDLs) became commonplace and the golden depiction of the design shifted from gates to register transfer level (RTL) code. Advanced simulation was used to thoroughly verify the design prior to create, and today, all the advanced ASIC functional verification methods are also leveraged on FPGA RTL code.