Register Manager
What can Register Manager offer over the in-house solution?
The in-house solution usually fits perfectly to the company’s flow and offer great flexibility with support being available on-site. The risks associated with it are maintenance cost and scale-ability. The internal solutions that work perfectly at start become increasingly complex putting a maintenance burden on the in-house champion. The in-house expert may want to move on to something else over time either within our outside the company.
Register Manager offers the same performance and flexibility as the in-house scripted solutions. Power users can use the shell mode, command files can be fitted into automated flows and our dedicated support makes sure that the turnaround time of new features are comparable to the in-house solution. At the same time it is a commercial grade software with customizable input and output formats so the in-house expert can focus on the last mile rather than having to maintain a full solution.
The HW/SW interface of a full IoT SoC can be programatically captured, checked for data integrity and its RTL, Verification, Documentation and SW deliverables can be generated in a few seconds.
What are the migration costs in terms of time and attention?
Register Manager comes with a rich and intuitive visual editor for all register and bitfield information. The GUI is much more than just entry fields for various attributes. It can be controlled with mouse only to change attributes like offsets, widths, access types and reset values. At the same time there is a full keyboard support as well with intuitive focus traversal that allows quick and efficient data capture without raising the hand from the keyboard – something that usually only spreadsheet based solutions offer.
The intuitive visualization of the HW/SW interface provides a gentle learning curve and makes junior engineers productive from day one. The powerful import API makes it easy to migrate existing machine-parsable data to Register Manager. The tool is also very lightweight both in terms of hard disk space and memory footprint making it an IT friendly solution.
What are the licensing options?
We offer great flexibility in terms of licensing that cater for the different requirements from IP startup companies to SoC design houses. There are options for node-locked and floating licenses, self-hosted and cloud hosted license servers and quantities from single-license to unlimited enterprise licenses. The tool is prepared for advanced features like queuing for a license or password protected licenses. We can also offer overdraft license options to make sure that increased usage in peak periods can be handled without having to go through the sales cycle.
Who is Register Manager for?
Register management solutions usually come from the HW design and verification teams and focused on their needs. Register Manager too covers the requirements of design and verification engineers making it an instant productivity booster for IP teams with its production ready Verilog and UVM outputs.
The tool also provides value to System Architects who can capture and maintain all the high level system information in a single source and broadcast this information to the other teams without having to maintain a human readable and a machine parsable format. Technical writers could appreciate the built in reStructuredText support that renders release quality HTML documentation from the simple textual description fields.
SW engineers can have register information loaded into their debuggers so they can instantly see what register they are working with on a particular offset without flipping the pages of the documentation back and forth. Engineering Managers can appreciate the consistent and high quality release deliverables their teams can offer to their internal or external customers.
Is it worth it?
In a complex SoC project the question of register management is usually not among the top five problems. But as Muhammad Ali said:
It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe.
In the ever increasing pressure of time-to-market companies shouldn’t spend time and resources on things that are not their main focus. Quickly and efficiently moving the smaller problems out of the way allows the engineers to focus on work where they can add the most value.
One of today’s challenges is the rising IoT market and Register Manager already covers the secure/non-secure separation of the memory map regions that are paramount in the IoT world. As this is our specialty, Register Manager is ready to meet today’s challenges as well as tomorrow’s.