Copenhagen-based Teklatech is such an interesting example of an EDA company: similar in many ways to other organizations in the ecosystem, but highly unusual as it is based in Denmark. When Founder & CEO Tobias Bjerregaard and I spoke by phone this month, he began with the motivation for his company’s technology.

The discussion then moved to the business challenges within EDA, a topic that Bjerregaard said he always enjoys discussing. As he feels that Teklatech is providing critical solutions for today’s semiconductor designs, it’s not surprising that his enthusiasm here is palpable, for the industry and the trends that drive it.

The Electronic System Design Alliance began life as the EDA Consortium over 25 years ago. Early last year, EDAC morphed into the ESD Alliance thanks to the efforts of many, not the least being ESD Alliance Executive Director Bob Smith, now in his third year serving in that role.

As currently I am mid-way through the process of speaking to the leadership of all of the member companies in the ESD Alliance, it was good to talk recently with Smith and discuss his vision for the future of the organization. His enthusiasm mirrors that of the many companies I have spoken with so far.

For a long time I have been a fan of code coverage tools that are embedded into the simulators themselves, and which give you the ability to switch easily between the code and the coverage results. It is particularly helpful to have a way of navigating the hierarchy, selecting a coverage result and then being able to look into the source code and make changes.

I recently had occasion to explain to someone how the feature works in Aldec’s Riviera-PRO, and to reflect on the tool developments that led to this great capability. As you may be aware, Aldec has a number of legacy coverage tools that allow you to view the coverage results from within the simulator; and which give you easy access to the coverage results and the corresponding lines of code. With the introduction of our unified coverage database – in .acdb format – it became possible to see the code coverage results in a more flexible format. The biggest boost, in my opinion, was the introduction of a cross-probing capability.

For those of you who are wondering how to use this feature.

• Open Riviera-PRO 2016.06 or newer and run your design with Coverage Enabled.
• Open the datasets window (View-> Hierarchy and Objects-> Datasets).
• Right-click in the window and select Add.
• Add the .acdb file associated with your design (it should show up as Simulation n, where n is number).
• Click on the newly added database.

For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog.