DAFCA Announces Availability of ClearBlue Debug Infrastructure IP and Software Product Family

Recently patented technology enables accelerated post-silicon SoC Debug, Diagnosis and Validation.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. — July 3, 2006 — DAFCA, Inc., the leading vendor of on-chip reconfigurable debug infrastructure, annouces the production release of ClearBlue™ version 2006.1. The ClearBlue product suite contains software modules and silicon debug infrastructure intellectual property (IP) that has been specifically developed to address the post-silicon validation challenges of nano-era semiconductor product design. System-on-Chip (SoC) design teams can incorporate ClearBlue's patented, reconfigureable fabric during RTL development, enabling powerful at-speed observation, diagnosis, and debug that accelerates validation and system-level bring-up with early silicon engineering samples.

Driven by the overwhelming challenges of delivering working silicon in a timely fashion for 90nm and smaller process nodes, leading-edge design teams have recognized the significant benefits of utilizing on-chip debug as a key component of their product success strategy. The production release of ClearBlue marks the culmination of the collaborative development partnerships that DAFCA has established with a select group of top-tier integrated device manufacturers, fabless semiconductor vendors and university partners, and now allows the broader design community access to the breakthrough technology pioneered by DAFCA.

Pre-silicon, the ClearBlue Instrumentation Studio software delivers a user-directed environment for insertion of the reconfigurable debug instruments (ReDITM) into the SoC RTL. Post-silicon, the ClearBlue Debugger offers a wide spectrum of configurable, at-speed analysis capabilities, including signal trace, on-chip logic analyzers, event- and assertion-based debug, and performance monitoring, that all feed directly into standard graphical debug software formats, including FSDB and VCD. ClearBlue supports the standard IEEE JTAG port for communication and control of the ReDI enabled SoC designs.

Availability

ClearBlue 2006.1 is available today for use with Verilog and VHDL designs, running on Linux workstations. ClearBlue is tightly integrated with existing RTL-based design flows and interoperates with the tool suites of the major EDA vendors. Pricing information for the ClearBlue software modules and ReDI instrumentation library access can be obtained by contacting DAFCA. DAFCA also provides fee-based technical services covering instrumentation plan development, insertion and verification support, and development of custom instrumentation.

DAFCA at DAC 2006

DAFCA will be participating at the upcoming Design Automation Conference, July 24-28, at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, exhibiting at booth #4155. Dr. Miron Abramovici, DAFCA Chief Technical Officer and founder, will be participating at two technical sessions:

• Tuesday, July 25, 10:30am: In the Special Technical Session entitled, Why Doesn't My System Work? , will present a paper entitled, “A Reconfigurable Design-for-Debug Infrastructure for SoCs.”

• Friday, July 28, 9am: A full-day tutorial session, “From Basic to Advanced Techniques for Silicon Debug and Diagnosis”, in conjunction with personnel from ARM and Intel.

About DAFCA

DAFCA, Inc. is a design automation software company that shortens post-silicon SoC validation and in-system bring-up. The DAFCA ClearBlue software suite and instrumentation library allows design teams to incorporate our patented reconfigurable debug infrastructure into their designs to observe, discover and diagnose functional errors at-speed, leading to dramatically lower development costs and accelerated time to volume silicon. Learn more about the company at www.dafca.com.