Magma Design Automation announced BoardView, a new software that extends CAD navigation and circuit debug from integrated circuits (ICs) to printed circuit boards (PCBs) and multichip modules (MCMs). BoardView is the only commercially available tool to integrate IC and PCB circuit debug with online signal trace and CAD navigation. With BoardView, fab teams can rapidly trace signals on the PCB from chips to board and back again and then quickly navigate failure analysis tools to X, Y locations to determine the cause of the fault.

BoardView leverages Magma’s Camelot technology, the industry standard for IC CAD navigation and circuit debug, to trace signals between the chip and the board. It reads industry-standard PCB and chip layout formats and displays them graphically. Formats supported include OASIS, Virtuoso, Gerber, GDSII and AutoCAD Drawing Exchange Format (DXF). Chip layouts are loaded from the Camelot database.

For every chip on the board, the user can invoke both BoardView and Camelot’s MaskView. This enables the user to seamlessly move from an intra-die chip view of the layout and netlists using MaskView to a macro view of a signal trace from die to board using BoardView, making fault tracing and diagnostics much easier.

BoardView is currently in limited release and will be generally available in the first quarter of 2010.