Mentor Releases Questa Codelink for Processor-Driven Tests

Venice, Florida — Mentor Graphics Corporation announced the immediate availability of the Questa® Codelink^TM product, an addition to the Questa Functional Verification Platform designed to speed the validation of ASICs containing one or more embedded processors. The Questa Codelink product is an integrated, source-level debug environment targeting processor driven tests.

Use of sign-off accurate, RTL processor models to drive cycles into multi-core SoC designs is a common practice among hardware verification engineers. This method of test is identical to the SoC's actual operation and provides effective functional verification. The lack of a good debug environment is a limitation to this approach. Isolating the cause of a failing processor driven test is often a tedious and time consuming process as most RTL processor models delivered by the core vendor provide little or no debug visibility.

To advance the use of processor driven test, Mentor developed Questa Codelink, a source-level debugger for RTL processor models supplied by ARM and MIPS. Codelink employs patent-pending technology which shadows the RTL model and generates a debug dataset. It presents the user with a full view of software variables, call stack, registers, and memory.

The rapid introduction by microprocessors vendors of multi-core chips makes it very likely that as many as one third of all SoC designs will be moving to multi-core in the next two years. Therefore it is important that Codelink support multi-core debug. Tracking multiple code threads and observing message passing via shared memory are key elements in debugging synchronization failures in multi-core systems. Codelink offers a variety of techniques for organizing and viewing the many representations of relevant data associated with multi-core source-level debug.

In addition, Codelink has the ability to log batch runs and debug interactively post-simulation, eliminating the need to rerun long simulations in order to debug them. Codelink also supports stepping backwards through source or assembly while variables, memory, and registers views accurately reflect the state of the system.

Pricing and Availability
The Questa Codelink product is available now with a starting price of $28,400. The following families of processors are currently supported: ARM7, ARM9, ARM11, ARM Cortex, MIPS 4, MIPS 24, and MIPS 74.