Concept Engineering Introduces RTLvision PRO to Help Designers of IP-based System-on-Chip Reach Faster RTL Code Closure

FREIBURG, Germany - July 6, 2006 - Concept Engineering today announced the release of RTLvision¢â PRO, a customizable tool to help designers of intellectual property (IP)-based system-on-chip reduce the complexity of the debug process and makes it easier to understand and change register-transfer level (RTL) code. With the addition of RTLvision PRO to Concept Engineering's product line, the company now offers interactive visualization and debugging tools for all major design levels: RTL-level, gate-level and transistor-level.

Integrated circuit (IC), SoC, and field programmable gate array (FPGA) design and verification engineers who develop, integrate and debug RTL code and IP components are facing increasing productivity pressure as designs become more complex and challenging. Designers often alleviate this pressure by using IP-based SoC design methods. RTLvision PRO allows these designers to quickly understand, integrate and debug third-party or ¡Èinherited¡È IP.

"For RTL designers, code is what really counts," said Gerhard Angst, president and CEO of Concept Engineering. "We have capitalized on our long experience in gate-level and transistor-level debugging to provide these designers with a very fast and innovative link between code and interactive graphic fragments."

RTLvision PRO helps engineers reach faster RTL code closure by enabling quick visualization of critical design fragments and easy understanding of design behavior and design miss behavior. With mixed-language support for System Verilog, Verilog and VHDL and ultra-fast HDL readers, RTLvision PRO can be used on today's most complex heterogeneous designs. This easy-to-use, high-performance tool helps reduce the complexity of the debug process via its interactive logic cone navigation feature, which shows just the critical portion of the RTL design in the logic cone window while concurrently providing links to the original source code. As a result, engineers can easily work on the important critical fragments of their RTL project without being disturbed by code and graphics not relevant for the job at hand.

RTLvision PRO also:

• Automatically extracts and analyzes clock trees and clock domains.
• Supports detection and resolution of clock domain problems.
• Allows incremental design compilation for very fast design update.
• Provides a tcl-based UserWare application programming interface (API) that allows highly flexible customization, allowing the designer to extend the functionality of RTLvision PRO to meet the immediate needs of the project.

Pricing and Availability

Free evaluation packages for RTLvision PRO are available from Concept's website at http://www.concept.de/rtl_register.html. Initial product demonstrations will be provided in Concept's booth #720 at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2006 in San Francisco's Moscone Center from July 24 through 27, 2006.

About Concept Engineering

Concept Engineering is a privately held company based in Freiburg, Germany, founded in 1990 to develop and market innovative schematic generation and viewing technology for use with logic synthesis, verification, test automation and physical design tools. The company's customers are primarily original equipment EDA tool manufacturers (OEMs), in-house CAD tool developers and semiconductor companies. For more information see http://www.concept.de