Complete Traceability Between System and Hardware Lifecycle Data

The 2020.3 release of Aldec’s Spec-TRACER™ bridges the communication gap between system and hardware development teams by adding integration with IBM^® Requirements Engineering DOORS^® Next.

  Henderson, Nevada, USA – April 8th, 2020 – Aldec, Inc., a pioneer in mixed HDL language simulation and hardware-assisted verification for FPGA and ASIC designs, has enhanced its popular unified requirements lifecycle management EDA tool, Spec-TRACER™, to support the exchange of data with IBM® Requirements Engineering DOORS® Next product, commonly used by system engineers. This new integration not only provides the hardware teams immediate visibility of changes to the functional specification it also makes meeting the traceability requirements of safety standard like DO-254 and ISO26262 much easier.

“Spec-TRACER has always provided a means of capturing a wide range of project artifacts from different sources, but this integration with IBM DOORS Next allows for much closer collaboration between systems and hardware teams,” comments Janusz Kitel, DO-254 Program Manager at Aldec. “It is important, especially for safety critical applications such as avionics, that change management processes are underpinned by traceability data.”

Spec-TRACER not only captures IBM DOORS Next artifacts and traceability data, but it can also export the relationships between requirements and hardware design data back to DOORS, allowing systems engineers to monitor the requirements coverage status.

Other new features include the ability to force the same parser settings on to all Spec-TRACER users within a team (which helps boost the level of collaboration and team efficiency) and the ability to disable requirements coverage verification during the capture process. Kitel comments: “At the start of your project you will have requirements coming in from lots of sources and at different times, so you are likely to gets lots of warnings about non-existent relationships, missing attributes, duplicated elements, incorrect values and so on. Once you are confident that most of your requirements are in place and their relationships fairly well understood you can then re-enable requirements coverage verification.”

Spec-TRACER also has a reports designer to help prepare project documentation that can, with the launch of the 2020.3 release, now include IBM DOORS artifacts alongside other design, verification and traceability data.