Overview
With today's complex protocols, debug has become one of the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of functional verification. The Protocol Analyzer, available with the Discovery Verification IP (VIP) family, is a simulator independent, protocol-aware debug environment that enables users to quickly debug protocols with any verification environment and easily share protocol-based simulation results across teams.
The Protocol Analyzer gives users a graphical view of the transfers, transaction, packets and handshaking of a protocol. It highlights relationships across the protocol hierarchy, visually unraveling the complex behavior of highly interleaved traffic. The Protocol Analyzer enables engineers to quickly understand protocol activity, identify bottlenecks and debug unexpected behavior. Errors, warnings and messages are annotated to rapidly identify problems in the simulation. It is integrated with Synopsys' DVE and Springsoft's Verdi to easily track behavior between protocol views and signal views.
Protocol Analyzer Datasheet
Protocol Analyzer Video Complex Protocols Drive Growing Debug Challenge
The growth in complexity and increasing number of protocols used on SoCs is creating a rapidly increasing verification challenge and debug bottleneck for verification engineers. Verification engineers must quickly become protocol experts and try to correlate information across different sources of information to find root cause of problems. Traditional debug methodologies use a combination of loosely connected waveforms, log-files, messages and documentation, which are insufficient for productive debug. The Protocol Analyzer, on the other hand, brings all of the debug information into one place and provides protocol awareness to simplify root-cause analysis.
Figure 1. Protocol Analyzer Trace Windows showing ARM® AMBA® AXI4™ and USB3
Synopsys Verification IP
Synopsys offers VIP for USB 3.0, USB 2.0, HDMI, AMBA AXI3, AXI4, ACE, Ethernet, PCI Express, MIPI (CSI-2, DigRF v4, DSI, HSICSI-2, etc.), SATA, OCP, and several others. See the complete list at http://www.synopsys.com/vip