Magma announces BoardView; extends chip-based navigation to circuit- and board-level debug

SAN JOSE, USA: Magma Design Automation has announced BoardView, a new software that extends CAD navigation and circuit debug from ICs to PCBs and multichip modules (MCMs).

BoardView is the only commercially available tool to integrate IC and PCB circuit debug with online signal trace and CAD navigation. With BoardView, fab teams can rapidly trace signals on the PCB from chips to board and back again and then quickly navigate failure analysis tools to X, Y locations to determine the cause of the fault.

"With the complexity of today's highly compressed PCB and MCM modules that use many chips, tracing the fault to its origin is not an easy task," said Ankush Oberai, vice president of Magma's Fab Analysis Business Unit.

"Failure analysis teams need to localize and trace faults to and from the chip to the PCB and that requires microscopic CAD support at both the chip and board level -- BoardView is the first tool to offer this dual capability."

BoardView
BoardView leverages Magma's Camelot technology, the industry standard for IC CAD navigation and circuit debug, to trace signals between the chip and the board. It reads industry-standard PCB and chip layout formats and displays them graphically.

Formats supported include OASIS, Virtuoso, Gerber, GDSII and AutoCAD Drawing Exchange Format (DXF). Chip layouts are loaded from the Camelot database.

For every chip on the board, the user can invoke both BoardView and Camelot's MaskView. This enables the user to seamlessly move from an intra-die chip view of the layout and netlists using MaskView to a macro view of a signal trace from die to board using BoardView, making fault tracing and diagnostics much easier.