Novas Named EDN 2002 Innovation of the Year Awards Finalist; Verdi Behavior-Based Debug System Garners Industry Recognition and Gains Momentum with Novas Customers
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 12, 2003--Novas Software,
Inc., the leader in debug systems for complex chip designs, announced
that its Verdi(TM) Behavior-Based Debug System has been selected as a
finalist in the EDN 2002 Innovation of the Year Awards competition.
This exclusive awards program, sponsored by Reed Business
Information's EDN Magazine, is dedicated to honoring truly outstanding
engineering products in the electronics industry. Verdi was also
highlighted among the top 100 products for 2002 in the December 12,
2002 issue of EDN.
User adoption of Verdi is accelerating with chip designers
realizing the benefits of its behavior-based approach -- the ability
to reduce the time spent in debug by 50 percent or more. Recent sales
of the Verdi design exploration and debugging software include a
multi-million dollar, multi-year agreement with one of the world's
largest chip makers. Also among Verdi customers are ATI Technologies,
Entropic Communications, ESS Technology and IP Flex, Inc.
"We recently switched over to Verdi, and designers find the
behavior-based approach and flow graphs allow them to cut through the
debug process faster. The intuitive GUI also helps them to understand
unfamiliar design elements," said Irwan Sie, director of IC Design at
ESS. "We have successfully deployed Verdi in our design environment at
ESS, and have a pipeline full of projects to use it on."
Suba Durairajan, senior design engineer at ATI Technologies
agreed, "Verdi has been very useful to debug complex logic. Without
Verdi, I would have had to understand unfamiliar logic and then hand
calculate to generate the results for a given input. With Verdi, all I
have to do is generate a temporal flow graph, plug in the input values
and hit evaluate. It is so quick and very intuitive. It reduced debug
time by at least 70 percent. We thought Debussy was the best, but
Verdi beats it!."
Verdi Behavior-Based Debug System
Introduced to the market in May of 2002, Verdi enables designers
to automatically find the causes of complex design behavior spanning
many clock cycles. Novas' patent-pending application of synthesis
technology and formal methods radically reduces the time required to
comprehend how a design works or why it does not. This becomes
increasingly important for system-on-chip (SoC) designs, which are
often comprised of unfamiliar elements, such as third-party
intellectual property, re-used portions of legacy code, and new
components created by distributed design teams.
"ATI's designs are huge and complex, and during the design phase
we never have a lack of failing tests. Verdi allows us to speed up the
debug phase at the end of the validation design cycle. It has
addressed those nasty chain-of-events bugs that used to take days to
understand and resolve, reducing the time to a couple of hours,"
commented Frank Hering, the director of VLSI for ATI.
Verdi builds on Novas' proven track record of innovation. The
second-generation technology advancements deployed by Verdi create an
entirely new debugging experience by elevating the designer's
attention to design behavior instead of low-level structural details.
This improves the ability to understand complex logic for design and
verification across block, chip and system hierarchies.
EDN 2002 Innovation of the Year
Seventeen product/technology areas were eligible for consideration
in the Innovation of the Year competition. A panel of EDN's technical
editors selected Verdi from a field of hundreds of candidates as
finalist in the EDA category.
Winners of the 2002 Innovation/Innovator of the Year Awards will
be chosen by EDN's readers through an online ballot on the EDN Access
Web site (www.edn.com). Voting takes place between March 6 and March
24, 2003. Readers can review the magazine's comments on Verdi in EDN's
March 6th print edition or by visiting the EDN Web site. All finalists
will be honored and winning products announced at the awards ceremony
on April 22, 2003 and published in EDN's May lst issue.
"The Novas team is very excited by the industry recognition of
Verdi and really pleased with customer reactions so far," said Scott
Sandler, president and CEO of Novas. "It's our strong belief that
Verdi's innovations will in turn enable even greater innovation by the
design community. Because Verdi gives back to designers big blocks of
valuable time, it has widespread implications for improving the
overall efficiency of the design verification process."
Headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts, EDN services the vital
information needs of design engineers and engineering managers
worldwide. The EDN franchise includes EDN, EDN Europe, EDN Asia, EDN
China, EDN Japan, and EDN Access, the only full-content, EOEM
publication and Web site.
About Novas
Novas is the pioneer of knowledge-based debug systems that reduce
the functional verification costs for complex IC designs. Building
upon the strength of its market-leading Debussy(R) Knowledge-Based
Debug System, Novas' Verdi(TM) Behavior-Based Debug System further
improves the efficiency of designers in the system-on-chip era with
advanced design exploration and debug capabilities. These allow design
teams to better understand and analyze complex or unfamiliar design
behavior, and cut by half or more the time it takes to locate, isolate
and understand the root causes of design problems. There are more than
10,000 Novas systems in use today at customer sites worldwide. Novas
is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. with offices in Europe, Japan and
Asia-Pacific. For more information visit http://www.novas.com or send
email to info@novas.com.
Debussy is a registered trademark and Verdi is a trademark of
Novas Software, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are
the property of their respective holders.
CONTACT: Media:
Novas Software, Inc., San Jose
Lorie Bowlby, 408/467-7871
lorie@novas.com
or
Public Relations for Novas
Wired Island, Ltd.
Laurie Stanley, 510/656-0999
laurie@wiredislandpr.com
