Aldec, Inc. has expanded the rule-checking capabilities of its ALINT-PRO tool in response to growing complexity of large-scale modern FPGA and ASIC designs. Rules new to the 2017.12 release of ALINT-PRO assure the integrity of a design’s finite state machines (FSMs) and help identify possible reset domain crossing (RDC) issues.

Verification of RDCs, also new to the 2017.12 release of ALINT-PRO, targets issues with complex SoC reset strategies and circuits with dynamically switchable regions. For instance, a harmless looking data transfer between registers with unrelated asynchronous reset controls may end with unrecoverable metastability, unless properly addressed at the RTL design phase.

Other new features include:

• Automatic extraction of FSM descriptions directly from VHDL and Verilog/SystemVerilog RTL code, accompanied with comprehensive FSM rule coverage
• Introduced support of RDC verification
• Re-architected verification solution for synchronous reset signals
• Expanded Aldec SystemVerilog Design rule library with more than 20 new rule checks
• Over 20 new rule checks and numerous existing rule enhancements that facilitate automated code reviews for VHDL designs, as well as clock/reset trees consistency with design constraints
• Extended design constraints support with automatic topology-based SDC/ADC drafts generation that covers essential timing properties, placement hints for vendor synthesis tools, as well as block-level constraints for black boxes based on aggregated data from external net connections
• Added automatic generation of black box components for unresolved VHDL design units
• Full coverage of block-level constraints for Lattice FPGA libraries for advanced CDC analysis

ALINT-PRO is a design verification solution for RTL code written in VHDL, Verilog, and SystemVerilog, which is focused on verifying coding style and naming conventions, RTL and post-synthesis simulation mismatches, smooth and optimal synthesis, reliable and portable FSM descriptions, avoiding problems on further design stages, clocks and reset tree issues, CDC/RDC, DFT, and coding for portability and reuse. The solution performs static analysis based on RTL and SDC source files uncovering critical design issues early in the design cycle.

For more information visit https://www.aldec.com/Products/ALINT-PRO.