Real Intent announced EnVision TCV, a complete software solution for Timing Closure Verification (TCV). EnVision TCV includes Meridian for clock domain crossing (CDC) verification and PureTime for timing exception verification. The inspiration for EnVision TCV is the fact that while the use of static timing is key to the release of reliable high performance designs, there are still significant holes in typical verification and timing flows. These holes, such as untimed and unverified paths, allow designs with errors to slip through.
By providing Proven Timing Closure, EnVision TCV complements existing flows, and avoids schedule delays or expensive chip respins. Two sources of errors are not covered by typical functional verification, static timing, and equivalence checking flows: clock domain crossing signals and exceptions to default timing. Clock domain crossing signals are not verified by simulation, emulation, prototyping or equivalency checking, nor are they checked by static timing, where in fact they are typically marked as false paths. Meridian (announced in April this year), part of EnVision TCV, is a new approach to CDC verification, and is engineered to verify that data traversing asynchronous clock domains on ASIC, SOC or FPGA devices is received reliably. After quick automatic setup, Meridian formally verifies both the structure and the protocols required for CDC safe design, then pinpoints design problems with an absolute minimum amount of manual sign-off.
PureTime, also part of EnVision TCV, removes the risk of errors in Synopsys Design Constraint (SDC) timing exceptions. Neither functional simulation, emulation, prototyping, nor static timing verifies the correctness of exceptions. PureTime's automatic processing dramatically improves project schedules when compared to manual review of exceptions. PureTime provides the accuracy of full sequential analysis. Combinatorial only solutions can not analyze multi cycle paths, and will erroneously invalidate false paths that full sequential analysis correctly verifies. EnVision TCV is available now for $97000.
