AMIQ EDA Releases Version 20.1 of the Design and Verification Tools Eclipse IDE

Feb 27, 2020, San Jose, California — AMIQ EDA, a pioneer in integrated development environments (IDEs) for hardware design and verification and a provider of platform-independent software tools for efficient code development and analysis, today announced that the latest 20.1 release of its Design and Verification Tools (DVT) Eclipse IDE includes important new features for developing, viewing, and maintaining complex hardware description language (HDL) designs. These features include:

• Redesigned Design Hierarchy View
• New Theme Engine, including support for dark themes
• WaveDrom timing diagrams
• Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) register bitfield diagrams
• Finite-state machine (FSM) transition tables
• Rich tooltips with JavaDoc and Natural Docs support
• Additional refactoring for register-transfer level (RTL) code
• Support for hyperlinks when working with generated RTL code

“These new features in DVT Eclipse IDE arise directly from user requests,” said Cristian Amitroaie, CEO of AMIQ EDA. “Many of the visualization improvements are aligned with current best industry practices and reflect user experience with other programs and applications they use on a daily basis. The improvements in performance and ease of use in this release will provide great benefit to all our users.”

As an example of an industry trend, many applications now load information as needed rather than forcing users to wait for everything to load before seeing anything. The redesigned Design Hierarchy View adopts this familiar approach for dramatic speedup and reduced memory consumption. Dark themes have also become popular in many applications to reduce eyestrain and extend battery life for portable devices. The new Theme Editor in DVT Eclipse IDE allows users to customize the theme, including built-in support for dark themes.

Waveforms are a key element of electronic design and verification, and many engineers have adopted the open-source WaveDrom tool for rendering images of complex waveforms from simple textual descriptions. The new release of DVT Eclipse IDE integrates WaveDrom support, including generation of waveforms from comments in RTL code. WaveDrom technology is also the basis for generation of UVM register bitfield diagrams. Users can hover over a UVM register definition and instantly visualize the bitfield layout.

Generation of state machine diagrams from FSMs in RTL code has long been a popular capability of DVT Eclipse IDE. Users requested the generation of state transition tables as well, so this feature is included in the 20.1 release. Other visualization enhancements include redesigned tooltips that are formatted based on JavaDoc and NaturalDocs comments in RTL code.

DVT Eclipse IDE includes sophisticated analysis engines underlying the intuitive graphical interface. Among other capabilities, these engines support refactoring, which modifies code to improve readability and maintainability while not changing its functionality. The new release includes two new powerful refactoring options. Users can now extract a section of code from one RTL module and relocate it to another module or a new file. This makes it easy to take a large module and break it up into several pieces for better readability and easier reuse.

The other new feature allows users to rename ports across the entire design hierarchy easily. The IDE automatically traverses up and down the hierarchy through the port connections, renaming appropriately at all levels. This saves many hours of manually tracing signals through dozens or hundreds of files and editing all that code.

Availability and Pricing

The new features are available today in DVT Eclipse IDE. Pricing is available upon request. Demonstrations and more information will be available at the Design and Verification Conference (DVCon), March 2-4 in San Jose, California. AMIQ EDA will exhibit in Booth #405 and will showcase all its products: DVT Debugger, Verissimo SystemVerilog Testbench Linter, and Specador Documentation Generator in addition to DVT Eclipse IDE.

About AMIQ EDA

AMIQ EDA provides design and verification engineers with platform-independent software tools that enable them to increase the speed and quality of new code development, simplify debugging and legacy code maintenance, accelerate language and methodology learning, improve testbench reliability, extract automatically accurate documentation, and implement best coding practices. Its solutions, DVT Eclipse IDE, DVT Debugger, Verissimo SystemVerilog Testbench Linter, and Specador Documentation Generator have been adopted worldwide. AMIQ strives to deliver high quality solutions and customer service responsiveness. For more information about AMIQ EDA and its solutions, visit www.amiq.com and eda.amiq.com.