EDA developers need to have a very active imagination. They need to imagine becoming their own end users. Sometimes they may become the designer, sometimes the verification engineer or perhaps even the design manager. This role play is essential for creating tools that will be embraced by the designers or else they are going to be just one-tool-wonders. For an EDA tool to become a regular tool in a designer’s tool chest, it needs to have a very high usability quotient, and a role play is essential for creating that.

A tool’s usage in a design flow can nominally be broken into three distinct phases a) Setup (b) Analysis and (c) Debug. Setup is required just once per design and is should not be a very onerous step. Analysis is done within the tool and should be highly, if not completely automated. It should minimize the need for much user attention other than tracking things like performance, memory size, etc. It is the debug phase where the user spends most of his/her bandwidth. They have to examine the output of the tool, combine their design knowledge with the tool’s analysis data, and quickly identify and repair the source of any detected issues.

To accurately capture and automate this flow, developers need to imagine how the users are going interact with their tool. For example – does the tool present information in the proper terms and conventions of the language in use? Is the debugging output organized consistently with the design structure? Is the tool effective at propagating bugs to observable points in the design? Is the debug environment able to reconstruct the faulty effect easily under user control? Effective organization of the output is essential to enable a user to view the results in ways that can be internalized easily.

By a large margin, debug is the major factor in a verification tool’s usability. An accurate understanding of the designer’s desires and needs is the most effective way of organizing the output in a clear, logical fashion. Developer imagination is a key part of this effort, as is real customer feedback to gauge how effectively the goal has been reached. Despite the availability of dedicated tools and methodologies for verification, users are spending a lot of time tracking down bugs that should have been easily caught and debugged. Sometimes, the only difference between failure and success is just a little imagination.

Apr 23, 2010