Date: 18/11/2009

Magma tunes it chip design software for PCB debugging

Magma has launched BoardView, a new software tool that extends CAD navigation and circuit debug from ICs to PCBs and multi-chip modules (MCMs) with online signal trace to determine the cause of the fault.

"With the complexity of today's highly compressed PCB and MCM modules that use many chips, tracing the fault to its origin is not an easy task," said Ankush Oberai, vice president of Magma's Fab Analysis Business Unit. "Failure analysis teams need to localize and trace faults to and from the chip to the PCB and that requires microscopic CAD support at both the chip and board level - BoardView is the first tool to offer this dual capability."

BoardView leverages Magma's Camelot technology, which reads PCB and chip layout formats and displays them graphically. Formats supported include OASIS, Virtuoso, Gerber, GDSII and AutoCAD Drawing Exchange Format (DXF). Chip layouts are loaded from the Camelot database.

For every chip on the board, the user can invoke both BoardView and Camelot's MaskView, to move from an intra-die chip view of the layout and netlists using MaskView to a macro view of a signal trace from die to board using BoardView, making fault tracing and diagnostics much easier.

Availability: First quarter of 2010

For more details visit www.magma-da.com