Interview with PDTi

Tool name: SpectaReg™
Vendor: PDTi
Webpage: http://www.productive-eda.com/register-management/
Interviewee: Jeremy Ralph, President

Gary Stringham: I’m talking to Jeremy Ralph of PDTi. What is the name of your tool?

Jeremy Ralph: SpectaReg is the name of our tool.

GS: What are two or three key features of your tool?

JR: One key feature would be that it’s a networked web application, so it can be deployed on the corporate internet and served to many different users. There are different permissions and access control on any component. If the component is only supposed to be read or written by one particular person, then that person can have access. Our rich and easy-to-use browser-based interface is one thing that differentiates this from some of the other products out there. With that comes a graphical user interface where people can point, click and so on.

Another feature is the ability to import legacy data in any format. We’ve got a data converter that’s fairly generic. With just a couple hundred lines of Python code, we or the customer can write a parser that will read in whatever the input format is and then the back end will convert it into our IP-XACT data format.

And then a third feature, one that we’ve recently added, is support for the AXI4-lite protocol. There are many other features that I could list, but those are three that come to mind.

GS: Describe to me your typical customer.

JR: We have large, publicly traded customers and we have smaller customers. The one thing the company must have is enough registers and enough pain that they need a solution. We’ve had companies replace internal solutions and also third party solutions with our products. And companies that have had no solutions to this problem; they’ve just been doing it manually.

GS: Can you tell me two or three success stories of your customers?

JR: One customer had an FPGA design that was done by people new to FPGA design and inexperienced with spinning an ASIC. Then someone new came on and started doing ASIC design and chose us for the register management. They have been using our tool since very early on and continue to license our products. They’ve spun multiple chips and had success with those chips in using our product to match the registers. They could not have done what they’re doing with the in-house solution for the price and value. They’ve had success in spinning those chips.

They have been able to use the product for more than what they had initially envisioned, for things like programming a chip and being able to monitor the values of registers and other things in the lab when they’re working to bring the chip up. It has been something that has been used beyond what they had initially thought they would do. We’ve got hooks that can do that sort of thing and we can generate other output formats.

Another example is a customer who had an existing register solution product from a third party that they didn’t like, so they brought us on. They had specific output formats that they needed for their C code and they needed it in their own flavor of coding style. Our templating mechanism that SpectaReg uses for generating code is very flexible, configurable; we can generate any output. We were able to set something up for them where SpectaReg generates the exact C code in the format that they wanted.

GS: Tell me about the enforcements that you have in your tool.

JR: Essentially, you can do a lint-like checking or rule-checking. You can, for example, make sure that the names of registers are uppercase with underscores or lowercase or however you want. You can make sure that the first few registers on the block have the version number, major version/minor version. Sometimes people like to have a special register at the end of a block that can be used for specific purposes. Those types of things you can build in with the tool, not just the checking but also automatic creation of the required registers at the required locations and so on. It requires a little bit of customization or set-up. That’s done in our Python scripting engine.

GS: That’s a good feature.

JR: Yeah, it’s certainly something that a few people have used and asked for and it increases the repeatability, too. Somebody new comes onto the team and they’re following the rules from the start.

GS: That’s all the questions I have for now. Thank you very much for your time.

JR: My pleasure.

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