TORONTO –– May 18, 2011–– Vennsa Technologies Inc., the leading supplier of automated functional verification debugging and error localization software, today announced immediate availability of OnPoint™ with Triage, along with a set of performance-driven features to enhance accuracy and increase capacity.
“Manual error localization and debugging consume more than 60% of the verification effort,” remarks Andreas Veneris, president and chief executive officer of Vennsa Technologies. “The verification community strongly advocates the use of new automated tools and methodologies to slash this productivity burden. OnPoint incorporates designer feedback and now addresses a wide set of debugging applications native to modern verification flows.”
Debugging Triage
OnPoint’s new features include a powerful triage engine, enhanced accuracy with “causality analysis” and significant increase in capacity.
“High-level failure diagnosis, or what we call triage, is hard because it is a catch 22 problem,” says Sean Safarpour, Vennsa’s chief technology officer. “In order to do accurate triage, engineers need to understand where the bugs are through low-level debug, but they cannot do low-level debug effectively without good triage.”
Verification engineers diagnose simulation failures at a high level to understand the cause of the failure and identify who should analyze and fix them. Previously, failure triage was performed in an ad hoc manner, based on messages from simulation log files, resulting in wasted resources when problems were handed to the wrong engineer, failures were incorrectly dismissed as duplicates or when duplicate bugs were re-analyzed as distinct bugs.
OnPoint now contains a triage engine that can differentiate automatically between sources of failures. The process starts with the diagnose engine performing automated root cause analysis to generate a list of bug sources, called suspects. Suspects are analyzed by the triage engine to generate a signature based on the error source. Signatures determine which failures contain similar or distinct bug sources.
The result of the triage process is a set of “bins,” where each bin contains failures with the same root cause. The verification team can then assign a bin to the appropriate engineer to make a fix. The entire process can be automated within regression verification flow to accelerate the debug and triage tasks.
OnPoint with Triage bridges that gap because it automatically screens failures and generates an X-ray picture of what is going on in the design and where the error source is originating from. This X-ray is used to do an intelligent binning by OnPoint.
Debug with Causality
OnPoint now utilizes a powerful causality analysis engine that can determine the root cause of failures at a finer resolution and with higher accuracy. The causality analysis engine can reason about complex relationships between suspects and determine the earliest fix possible. This information allows the user to hone in on the bug source with greater efficiency.
The causality analysis engine shows the user how all the suspects are related and where it is the most appropriate location to make the fix.
Further, the new release of OnPoint contains a set of powerful optimization techniques that allow root cause analysis to be applied to designs at the sub-system level during simulation-based verification.
OnPoint diagnose and triage engines are available now and can be purchased separately using time-based licenses.
Vennsa will demonstrate OnPoint in Booth #2912 at the 48th Design Automation Conference (DAC) June 6-8 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, Calif.
About Vennsa
Vennsa Technologies Inc. is dedicated to the automation of debugging and error localization. Its breakthrough OnPoint tool is the industry’s only automated debugging software that localizes the source of functional errors without any user guidance. When failures occur, OnPoint quickly identifies the root cause of errors and provides error fixes so the user can remove the bugs. Vennsa, headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, has a dedicated sales and support teams in the United States and in Japan. Telephone: (408) 400-3708. Email: info@vennsa.com. Website: www.vennsa.com.
