Real Intent unveils major performance enhancements in Ascent IIV and Ascent XV tools

USA: Real Intent Inc. announced new releases of its Ascent Implied Intent Verification (IIV) and Ascent X-Verification (XV) tools for early functional analysis of digital designs, delivering significant performance enhancements for users.

Ascent products find elusive bugs and eliminate sources of uncertainty that are difficult to uncover using traditional Verilog or VHDL simulation, leading to both improved quality of results (QoR) and productivity of design teams.

Among new Ascent IIV features and enhancements are:
* Up to 50-percent faster performance on designs greater than 100K gates.
* Incremental runs enabling users to resume previous analysis and avoid a complete re-start.
* A new double-toggle net check that eliminates toggle net false positives caused by reset state values.
* VCD traces that provide a marker to show the time of failure.

Likewise, new features in Ascent XV for detecting unknowns in digital hardware include:
* Enhanced modeling of X’s that come from retention flops, a major source of X’s in a design.
* Broader coverage in identifying all X-sources and X-sensitive logic found by fast design audit.
* Tighter SimPortal integration to logic simulation that automatically generates a simulation free of unnecessary X issues.
* A new debug interface that shows the path from the sensitive construct to an X-source, facilitates waivers of X-sources and X-sensitive nets, and provides links for source code navigation.

Lisa Piper, technical marketing manager at Real Intent, said: “The enhanced performance of IIV means designers can find more bugs more quickly without the need for any test benches. Our latest release of XV provides a unique X-hazard report that quickly pinpoints where sources of unknowns can obscure functional bugs or generate false problems in gate-level netlists.

"IIV’s 50-percent faster performance for blocks greater than 100K gates and XV’s enhanced detection of unknowns (X’s) in digital hardware including retention flops are further proof that Real Intent delivers what we believe are the industry’s best-in-class tools. Our Ascent products are the fastest and highest-capacity verification solutions available for uncovering issues prior to digital simulation.”

Ascent IIV and Ascent XV now deliver enhanced support for SystemVerilog, Verilog and VHDL languages, and improve ease of use in both the GUI and low-noise reporting of design issues. They also come with Verdi3 integration now to support this industry-leading debug platform from Synopsys (formerly SpringSoft).

The latest releases of Ascent IIV and Ascent XV are available immediately for download from the Real Intent web-site.