Design compilation engine captures all angles

Altium is to include new design capture product codenamed nVisage in the upcoming version of its Protel board-level design system.

Altium is to include new design capture product codenamed nVisage in the upcoming version of its Protel board-level design system.

nVisage is a versatile and fully integrated design capture system for professional engineers which integrates schematic design entry with schematic and text-based VHDL design, and allows a single design to be captured using any mix of these design entry methods.

As well as offering engineers a choice of design entry, nVisage also includes powerful simulation tools and extensive design and document management that enables engineers to manage the entire design process.

Other notable features of nVisage include its extensive integrated libraries and library management capabilities, and a novel "design compilation" engine that ensures the integrity of the entire design project.

With the introduction of this new design capture product, Altium has integrated two different entry methodologies, and given engineers the benefits of both in one fully integrated product.

Altium's nVisage will fill a substantial gap in the market for engineering tools.

Relatively inexpensive schematic capture tools have been around for a long time, but there have been no significant schematic technology breakthroughs for engineers since the move to the Windows platform.

At the same time, Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) have been making inroads as a way of designing digital circuits, particularly circuits destined to reside in programmable devices such as FPGAs.

"While HDLs bring powerful programming-like features to the design process they lack the intuitive ease-of-visualisation that schematic capture brings", says Rob Irwin, Altium's Brand Strategy Manager.

"What nVisage does is integrate schematic and HDL-based design, and add powerful HDL features to the schematic capture process, such as the ability to easily define multiple instances or channels in a design, and provide full integration and synchronisation between schematic and HDL-based source files.

For example, changes made to pin assignments of an FPGA in the VHDL code can be propagated throughout a project, with the component pins on the circuit schematic automatically changed to reflect the changes in the VHDL".

nVisage is a complete design capture system for electronic design engineers.

It provides all the tools necessary to carry out the conceptual design phase of electronic products.

nVisage will combine schematic capture and Spice-compliant circuit simulation with a versatile VHDL entry environment (both text and schematic based) and VHDL simulation.

nVisage is based on the Design Explorer platform, which provides design project management features and tool integration.

With nVisage's versatile design entry, engineers will be able to choose the method of design entry that suits them best - text or schematic-based VHDL entry, schematic circuit design, or a mixture of all of these.

For example, when designing a circuit that will contain one or more FPGAs, engineers can use a mix of schematic and text-based VHDL entry to create the FPGA functionality, and then integrate this with the circuit-level schematics.

nVisage features design compilation - a process of verifying the integrity of all the source files of the design.

nVisage finds all the inconsistencies between the schematic and VHDL files and offers a choice of changing either the VHDL or the schematic which it then does automatically - including pin-swapping.

nVisage includes a comprehensive component library management system that will continue and extend the integration present throughout the product.

The component management system will allow engineers to associate multiple models with a component.

These models can be schematic symbols, PCB footprints, simulation models, signal integrity models, VHDL representation etc.

The models represent different 'views' of the same component, and the appropriate model is selected by nVisage and other Altium products based on the context in which it is used.

nVisage will be included as part of the upcoming new version of Altium's Protel board-level design system, and will be subsequently available as a stand-alone product in Q2, 2002.

Pricing for the stand-alone nVisage product is yet to be announced.

nVisage will come with free 12 months membership to the Altium Total Support (ATS) programme.

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