How Xingtera Created a Fast and Efficient Design Process With IDesignSpec

“Our Engineering team is convinced that Agnisys’ IDesignSpec™ is a great tool to help them improve their productivity significantly. Charles Qi, VP of Engineering of Xingtera”

Xingtera is an innovative networking startup company needed to create a fast and efficient design process. They choose IDesignSpec™ from Agnisys. In this article Charles Qi, VP of Engineering explains why.

Challenge
Today’s semiconductor industry is a challenging industry to start a new business. The high development cost and long development cycle discourage a lot of investors and end-customers from signing up with startup companies. The only way a semiconductor startup can survive is to minimize operational cost and reduce time-to-market. Startup companies all adopt strategy to have oversea offices outside of US to reduce the cost of task force. However, this strategy often hinders productivity due to lack of consistent methodology, lack of communication and difference of culture.

Xingtera is a semiconductor startup in Silicon Valley. Their entire engineering team is spread out in four geographical locations, our ASIC, DV and SW teams are in separate locations from different culture. In order to deliver successful product with limited resource, we strive to adopt engineering practice and methodology that would significantly improve our productivity

Solution Trail Laid By Agnisys
One key goal in this quest is for us to bring consistency between RTL design, verification and software development from the get-go. We found IDesignSpec™ from Agnisys as a great tool to help us achieve our objectives. Through our evaluation, we have found that IDesignSpec™ covers many engineering disciplines comprehensively from RTL design, verification, and software development to documentation. It is very easy to setup and yet with a lot of flexibility. For example, the tool comprehensively supports different register definition types, taking into consideration of both software and hardware accesses. It has multiple coding style support for generating C header files suitable for embedded software development. Immediately after we installed the tool, we were able to produce simulatable RTL, DV models as well as software code that can be executed on our FPGA prototype.

Charles Qi, VP of Engineering of Xingtera quotes the beauty of IDesignSpec is that it is self-explanatory and takes almost no training for HW or SW engineers to use. Unlike other tools that rely on fancy and complicated GUI yet only produce limited documentation, IDesignSpec™’s Word and Excel plug-in capability naturally support great documentation without any duplication of work.

Overall, our engineering team is convinced that IDesignSpec™ is a great tool to help us improve our productivity significantly. When asked about the customer support from Agnisys throughout Installation and Usage, he exclaims “Awesome!