Real Intent tackles CDC at the physical level
Real Intent is extending its suite of clock domain crossing tools with a new flavor of Meridian that addresses gate-level issues that occur after synthesis.
Meridian Physical CDC, available immediately, builds on the family’s existing experience in RTL CDC sign-off by addressing problems that can arise when the code is run through implementation tools.
Examples of CDC problems that can be introduced at that stage include glitching on control signals, clock networks and data signal paths, and also the incorrect optimization of clock synchronizer logic.
The company therefore sees Meridian Physical CDC as very much a missing piece in the design jigsaw.
“The CDC problems introduced during synthesis along with the addition of test logic and low-power optimizations are risk factors that have not been covered adequately until now,” says Ramesh Dewangan, vice president of product strategy.
As with Real Intent’s RTL-focused tools, the new physical option has a plethora of in-built checks and draws upon the vendor’s static analysis engines. Meridian Physical CDC also includes the company’s recently launched iDebug design intent debugger and data manager.
Meridian Physical CDC at DAC
As you would expect, Meridian Physical CDC is set to be a tentpole for Real Intent’s activities at the Design Automation Conference in early June. The company is already setting appointments to demonstrate the new software.
Going further a short video interview with Oren Katzir, the company’s vice president of application engineering, goes deeper into the gate-level CDC challenges that are becoming increasingly tricky for design and verification.
“People are seeing CDC failures on designs that were completely clean in RTL,” he notes. “The reason for that is that implementation tools – everything that is happening post-RTL – can inject glitchy behavior or glitchy circuits on the CDC crossings without the designer knowing, ending up in a CDC violation even though the RTL is completely clean.
“The majority of the verification is done at the RTL. However, there are some aspects that have to be done at the netlist as well.”
