Stylized representation of silicon debugging software schematics overlaying a 3D IC with copper traces atop a dark blue PCB.

Overview Resources

Altair® Silicon Debug Tools™

Faster IC Design Debugging with Smart Visualization

Designing and debugging modern integrated circuits (ICs) is highly complex, requiring companies to assemble large design and verification teams to identify and resolve issues. Altair® Silicon Debug Tools™ is a high-capacity, high-performing solution that reduces complexity for design teams and empowers users of all levels to rapidly debug IC designs, significantly shortening the development cycle.

Altair’s IC debug capabilities handle an exceptional range of system, register-transfer level (RTL), gate-level, and SPICE-level design abstractions for modern system-on-chip (SoC) platforms, ensuring that semiconductor designs reach the manufacturing stage fault-free.

Silicon Debug Tools Overview Video

Try Altair’s family of silicon debug solutions.

Why Silicon Debug Tools?

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Slash SoC Debugging Time

Shorten design cycles with Altair’s family of silicon debugging tools. Flexible Altair® StarVision PRO™ swiftly pinpoints, visualizes, and resolves mixed-mode design issues and supports intellectual property (IP) building block integration in IC designs. Additionally, Altair’s debugging software solution provides efficient SPICE analysis with Altair® SpiceVision PRO™, digital register transfer level (RTL) debugging with RTLvision PRO™, and gate level debugging with Altair® GateVision PRO™.

Woman in front of dual monitors displaying Altair’s silicon debugging tools, SpiceVision PRO (left) and RTLvision PRO (right).

Manage IC Design Complexity

Drones, smart phones, autonomous vehicles, life-saving medical devices, and beyond all require detailed, reliable semiconductor designs. Managing the complexity of these SoCs is possible with Silicon Debug Tools’ powerful yet friendly workflows that empower newcomers and experts alike to detect and mitigate design issues early in the development cycle, preventing costly design and production issues from developing downstream.

Semiconductor, with subtle “AI” printed on top, positioned on top of a blue PCB.

Customize IC Design Checks

Launch non-standard integrated circuit designs into production earlier and with greater confidence. With tool customization and workflow automation, engineers can define custom checks, ensuring that optimized, validated, and reliable designs reach the manufacturing stage faster.

Key Features

Mixed-Signal Design Verification

Debug complex chip designs and IP building blocks with smart incremental schematic navigation, logic cone extraction, digital and analog waveform viewing, and RTL source code exploration.

One Solution for Any Chip, SoC, or IP

Smoothly integrate and validate complex SoC designs. Altair’s all-in-one StarVision PRO easily handles all digital, analog, or mixed-signal design components and any hard or soft IP building blocks.

High-Capacity IC Design Database

Altair’s silicon debugging tools solution offers a high-performance and memory-efficient database that easily handles designs for large, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), SoCs, and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

Open Silicon Debugging Tools

IC designs need to meet performance, integrity, and technical specifications without errors. Altair’s debug solutions offer open, application programming interface (API) customization to debug the most complex designs efficiently while maintaining lower development costs.

Intuitive GUI Cockpit

Designers can generate debugging views on the fly and easily and incrementally navigate through large and intricate models such as central-processing-unit (CPU), graphics-processing-unit (GPU), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine-learning designs.

Workflow Compatibility

Silicon Debug Tools support all industry standard EDA file formats including SystemVerilog, Verilog, VHDL, SPICE, HSPICE, SPECTRE, ELDO, SPEF/DSPF, VCD, and SDF.

Automation and Scripting

Streamline debug processes and address specialized circuit debugging needs with a template library of 100+ customizable applications, available as source code.

Simulation Integration

Silicon Debug Tools – in combination with Altair’s digital simulator and analog simulator, Altair® HyperSpice™ – deliver a superior simulation and debug environment. Alternatively, use Silicon Debug Tools with any major EDA simulation tool.

Flexible Licensing

Cost-effective Altair Units licensing gives customers access to the most flexible and comprehensive design debugging software and electronic design automation (EDA) solutions, ensuring product reliability while maintaining lower development costs.