Analog Design Debug System - ADDS
ADDS is an interactive tool for faster detection, and repair of bugs in transistor circuits used in analog, mixed-signal and digital designs. With its extensive signal-tracing, analysis, and reporting capabilities, ADDS delivers a 10X breakthrough in designer productivity.
Ending Needless Manual Debug
ADDS addresses the lack of automation tools for finding and fixing bugs in transistor-level designs. Unlike digital designers who have highly automated design and debug environments, analog designs have been using manual methods to trace signals, build test fixtures, and needlessly re-run simulations. There is an urgent need for better and faster automation for debug of transistor-level circuits.
Circuit debug relies on labor-intensive manual methods to trace the causes and discover the sources of design mis-behavior. A typical approach begins when an error is noticed at some time point in a transient simulation. Immediately, the designers tries to determine which portion of the circuit is generating the mis-behavior. He may refer to a circuit schematic to see the driving circuitry for that node in the design. But he must manually cut out the sub-circuit, code and insert the driving sources and then attempt to re-simulate to reproduce the error. At this point he may have correctly isolated the design error or if the manual signal tracing he did was incorrect, he may need to re-cut, setup and simulate again. Finally after determining the cause of the error, and changing the design, the original simulation is re-run from the beginning and not by re-starting it at a time just before the misbehavior.
ADDS provide a wide range of features and capabilities to automate debug and improve speed of repair. ADDS technology is the subject of three pending patents.
Benefits and Features of ADDS
- Full-signal traceback quickly shows the sources and causes for a specified circuit error and isolates that portion of the circuit that needs to be fixed.
- Automatic test case and test fixture generation for exploring the behavior of a suspect circuit or sub-circuit.
- Automatic checkpoint for restart of simulation, just before mis-behavior becomes active, to eliminate time wasted on unnecessary simulation.
- Circuit checks for detecting floating and undriven nodes, unitialized latches, and exceeding reliability limits and user design margins.
- Tight integration to PCSIM for 10X faster simulation of analog circuits
- Graphical user interface for quick manipulation of circuit schematics, device and component parameters, and PCSIM analog simulator controls.
ADDS takes full advantage of Cybereda’s PCSIM parallel SPICE circuit simulator. PCSIM is a full-featured, HSPICE and SPECTRE compatible tool that delivers sign-off-level accuracy.
Evaluate PCSIM
To request more information or a ADDS evaluation, please contact Cybereda by clicking here or calling +1-408-615-0586
