Long-time Debussy User ESS Switches to Verdi
for Even More
Debug Productivity
Download pdf 
Background
ESS Technology, Inc. is a leading supplier of high-performance, feature-rich and cost-efficient silicon solutions for the rapidly growing digital video market and digital entertainment market. The company is also a leading provider of products that enable the emergence of digital home systems delivering and managing entertainment and information in the home. Headquartered in Fremont, California, ESS has R&D, sales, and technical support offices worldwide (www.esstech.com).
The Company's digital video solutions span from MPEG1 VCD products to MPEG2 DVD products and beyond, with MPEG4 and DiVX video decoding. The ESS DVD product lines offer advanced features such as progressive scan video, digital video output, Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro Logic (TM), Dolby EX (TM), DTS (TM) Surround, as well as DTS ES (TM) Surround audio decoding to elevate the digital video and audio experience to a new level of enjoyment. And for the consumers who are fond of archiving, ESS also offers a line of digital video recorder solutions to allow for recording of broadcast contents to a hard disk drive or directly onto a recordable disc.
Chip design strategies a key to
success
One of the corporate philosophies at ESS is a continual
drive to improve efficiency and decrease the time to market for
all of their offerings. For Irwan Sie,
Director of IC Design for ESS, reducing
the time spent on debug processes has been a personal
mission since 1996. Sie discovered Novas Software more than six
years ago and brought Novas' Debussy
ÒDebug System in-house as a way to decrease development time and streamline the process
of debugging designs. Novas' continued
product enhancements have been a part
of ESS and Sie's work ever since.
An early adopter of Debussy gets hooked on Verdi
"When I was introduced to Novas, I thought their technology was groundbreaking, as it cut our debug time in half," says Sie. "What I find today is that Novas has continued to innovate, and its new offerings have helped us continue to shorten our debug cycles. We've stayed with Novas step by step, and they're now a standard part of our design and development process."
Several months ago, the combination of a new design project and a demonstration of new capabilities from Novas led Sie and his team to Novas' latest product, the Verdi (TM) Behavior-Based Debug System. The engineering team faced unprecedented size and complexity challenges with their latest projects.
"We were very fluent in Debussy and Novas told us about their latest offering, so we decided to give Verdi a try," Sie said.
Packaged with all the core capabilities of Debussy, Verdi enables ESS to take advantage of a fundamentally new approach to understanding how and why a design works or why it does not. Verdi's advances include unique new behavior analysis and visualization capabilities that provide insight into complex design behavior over time. These visualization capabilities were of particular interest to Sie and his team.
"Novas' statement flow graphs were one of the most useful features for our last debugging project," states Sie. "They enabled us to visualize the simulation through time, chase bugs chronologically, identify the causes for particular bugs, and helped us identify where each bug came from. Before, this process was a very manual one. Now we can get a big picture of the design and quickly pinpoint errors. We can chase a bug down in a half hour compared to maybe spending all morning and all afternoon with other approaches."
Verdi's visualization and analysis capabilities offer multiple viewing and analysis perspectives and are fully integrated using point-and-click and drag-and-drop techniques to maximize productivity. They allow users to locate and isolate logic quickly and easily, and to see results in the proper and easily understood context.
"Debugging is a lot like wandering forward and backwards through a tall maze, where you can only see where you're going one turn at a time," adds Sie. "But by using Verdi's visualization capabilities, it's like reducing the wall height to the point where you can see over them, so you can map out your turns in advance to see where you need to go, and this helps you get to the end point much faster."
Another feature that ESS found quite useful was Novas' finite state machine capability, a visualization tool that produces bubble diagrams from Verilog source code. "More and more aspects of the design process have become unfamiliar to the designer who is working on it, as collaboration is commonplace, and handoffs from one designer to another can create gaps," states Sie. "Verdi's state machine diagram feature helps teams pick up other people's blocks, which is critical for us moving forward. I feel like Novas understands this concept, and we're glad to see it as part of the Verdi offering."
Flexibility for multiple design requirements
Novas' strategy treats the debug process as an independent but integral function that must be linked to the overall verification environment and the entire design flow. This requires a system that is open and interoperable, allowing the integration of any number and type of third-party tools.
At ESS, such interoperability is particularly useful, as the Company's engineering teams use a myriad of different tools to create and compile their own blocks at different levels of abstraction and at different stages of integration. Each engineer completes the verification and debug process prior to releasing each block to the project manager. The final process of integrating and assembling different blocks - many created in several different environments - and then debugging the overall assembled project can be a daunting challenge. With Verdi, they get a consistent way to view verification results and not have to worry about tedious integration tasks to support each tool they use.
Sie agrees, "First of all, Novas plugs into any environment, and can tailor itself to any flow. There are a lot of PLIs - it's well designed. Our individual designers love the product because it works with any and all of the verification tools they happen to be using."
Looking ahead, ESS has a pipeline of projects that will begin in parallel, each requiring a two-to-three month verification and debugging cycle, and Sie plans to use Novas' offerings on each. "Novas is a great company to work with. Their products provide the functionality we need, and the technical support staff has been excellent," concludes Sie.