Automated Debugging for Chip Design – this innovative approach developed by the newly-founded company solvertec GmbH gained the jury’s favor in the celebrated business-plan contest IKT Innovativ. At this year’s CeBIT, the five-person start-up team led by Joint Managing Directors Dr. Daniel Große and Jan Wessels were awarded one of the main prizes for the outstanding way they set about launching their university spin-off enterprise. The prize, worth 30,000 euros, was presented by the German Minister of the Economy, Dr. Philipp Rösler.
The innovative solvertec approach could translate into wide-ranging benefits for both people and the economy. All around us, mobile phones, automobiles, the aerospace industry, medical technology and energy supplies all rely on intelligent systems incorporating microchips. The development of microprocessors is a highly complex affair, where humans quickly come up against their limits and programming errors can easily occur. Today, identifying and rectifying these pitfalls presents a serious challenge, on average consuming about a third of the total time spent on microchip development. On top of this, because the time required to deal with the increasingly complex margins of error is becoming more and more incalculable, it is becoming increasingly difficult to estimate the time needed for the development phase. “The reason for this time-consuming technical effort is that the developers have to analyze and carry out their debugging troubleshooting manually”, says Dr. Daniel Große, explaining the fundamental issue addressed by solvertec. “Our company has come up with a solution to this problem which will result in less time being lost before the final product goes to market. We call it Debug!t.”
It takes just a few clicks for the software to identify and rectify sources of error in the programming code. In addition to this, the job of tracing errors can be carried out by an individual member of the team, thus avoiding unnecessary iterations. Debug!t can be applied to very large circuits, setting the stage for next-generation chips.
Debug!t is the culmination of years of research spent on developing methods for automating debugging techniques by Dr. André Sülflow, Dr. Daniel Große and Prof. Görschwin, working in the research group ‘Computer Architecture’ at the University of Bremen under the leadership of Prof. Rolf Drechsler. The start-up team is made complete by Dipl.-Kfm. Jan Wessels in the University’s Department of Medium-sized Enterprise, Business Start-ups and Entrepreneurship, who researches the causes of both successful as well as failed innovative start-up companies.
The company solvertec GmbH was founded in February 2013 within the frame of the University of Bremen’s first EXIST research transfer project called “SolVerTec – Solution Verification Technologies” (expert mentor Prof. Rolf Drechsler, research group Computer Architecture), which is funded by the German Ministry of the Economy and Technology (BMWi). The program provides targeted support for technical innovations developed at universities which lead to the founding of a start-up enterprise. During the pre-start-up phase, the new entrepreneurs were assisted by a business coach, the Bremer Senior Service e.V., as well as UniTransfer and BRIDGE.
Further information can be obtained from:
solvertec GmbH
Geschäftsführer: Dr. Daniel Große, Jan Wessels
Phone: +49 421/40 89 84 51 & 52
email: infoprotect me ?!solvertecprotect me ?!.de
www.solvertec.de
