We were keeping track of Veridae as they came onto the scene with their debug technology, starting with Clarus, adding Corus, and Certus (even as their strategy and branding were morphing based on customer input). And then Tektronix swooped them up.

I talked with Tek’s TMM Mike Juliana about the new Embedded Instrumentation Group that formed as a result of the acquisition. It includes the engineers that had been working at Veridae, and they’re still located in Vancouver, BC (although commercialization is now done in Southern California).

Their focus is to provide non-invasive ways of providing visibility inside chips, across chips, across busses, and across clock domains. The idea of non-invasive (or non-intrusive) is to violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: you don’t want your observation to alter the results. In particular, performance shouldn’t change (which we all know can happen merely by adding a probe).

The products directions that they’re taking therefore fall into four categories:

–          Inside the chip (that is, the Veridae stuff)

–          Parallel busses

–          Serial busses or links

–          Software

The first three are in place today (we’ll look at a serial box in a few days). Even though they may all need to be used together, for now, the three don’t cohabitate in a single box: they’re separate units that collaborate by cross-triggering each other.

The software element is a future consideration.