Concept Engineering Wiki

Concept Engineering is a privately held company, based in Freiburg, Germany. It was founded in 1990 to develop and market innovative, automated schematic generation and viewing technology. The company’s mission is to simplify and accelerate the electronic product development, manufacturing and service value chain by delivering the world’s best automatic schematic generation, visualization and debug technology. The company is working with many customers, including commercial Electronic Design Automation tool vendors and in-house CAD departments, as well as development teams for SoC/IC, mixed-signal and FPGA designs. The company has also been particularly successful solving unique challenges for automotive/aeronautical electronic development and service groups.

Concept’s debugging technology is delivered standalone, or may be incorporated into Electronic Design Automation (EDA) or other CAD tools to provide specific capability. Providing easy visual representations of system models and code requires powerful rendering technology requiring years to engineer and this is often not the core competency of the CAD or EDA engineering teams. As such, producing these visual capabilities can occupy engineering teams for months on a project that is outside the specialization of the company.

Furthermore, some industry segments require highly specialized debug and visualization mechanisms for both development and post-production product maintenance. For example, automotive and aeronautical designs have specific design architectures and safety requirements, as well as rigorous service needs, which may be accelerated through the use of advanced, reactive visualization.

• Silicon Debug: Concept provides an advanced debug solution that may be used by electronic designers to quickly find and repair design faults. The debug environment operates on a large variety of digital and analog designs from system to layout level, and may be easily customized for specific purposes.
• OEM Visualization Engines: The Concept technology has been encapsulated into engines that may be tightly integrated into third party CAD and EDA tools to provide specific functionality while saving many months of engineering time and support. Today, Concept works with more than 40 OEM partner companies.
• Automotive/Aeronautical Visualization: The Company also provides technology that accelerates development, manufacture and service in these leading edge industries with on-the-fly visual rendering to enable quality and speed. For example, Concept’s E-engine provides innovative methods to automatically generate harness visualizations, system diagrams or service schematics generated for specific error codes (DTCs).

Customers & Ecosystem
Concept Engineering works with a variety of companies and partners. Its debug products are in use in multiple leading semiconductor companies and are leveraged on complex digital and mixed signal devices. The company works with more than forty OEM partners including EDA companies, in-house CAD departments and other tool providers. Concept can also claim leading edge automotive and aerospace customers for its range of products in this industry.

Products
The Vision Tools – Electronic Design Debug Made Easy
StarVision PRO 6.11.1
StarVision is a mixed-signal debugger that reads RTL, gate-level, SPICE-level and IP descriptions, to provide comprehensive debug for complex SoCs and AMS designs. Open APIs allow compelling options for tool customization and design flow automation.

RTLvision PRO 6.11.1
RTLvision is an RTL debugger that reads SystemVerilog, VHDL, and Verilog as well as Liberty. It elaborates the given RTL and displays schematic diagrams, optimized for human readability. The integrated waveform viewer displays signal activity over time.

SpiceVision PRO 6.11.1
SpiceVision is a transistor-level debugger that reads almost any SPICE netlist (such as HSPICE, Eldo, Spectre, CDL or Calibre) and post-layout parasitic formats such as DSPF and SPEF. SpiceVision allows easy circuit exploration and rapid connectivity tracing.

GateVision PRO 6.11.1
GateVision is a gate-level debugger that reads Verilog or EDIF netlists, or LEF/DEF connectivity and displays them as schematic diagrams. GateVision gives engineers the ability to easily display and understand logic and to analyze connectivity.

Nlview Widgets – Software Components for EDA & CAD Tool Development
Nlview Widgets 6.8r2
Nlview automatically generates custom schematic diagrams. Nlview Widgets are available for many GUI development platforms including: Qt, Java, wxWidgets, Tcl/Tk, Perl/Tk, MFC and JavaScript (runs inside Web browsers) and as a GUI-less version.

T-engine 6.8r2
T-engine is an option to Nlview for automatic transistor-level schematic generation. It may be combined with all supported GUI platforms. T-engine enables software developers to quickly build GUI cockpits for SPICE-level EDA tools.

S-engine 6.8r2
S-engine is an option to Nlview for automatic system-level schematic generation. S-engine may be combined with all supported GUI platforms and helps software developers to build smart, block level editors, SoC/IP assembly tools or system-level visualization tools.

E-engine
E-engine is an option to Nlview that allows the automatic generation of E/E architecture schematic diagrams. E-engine enables software developers to easily build automotive & aerospace development and service tools or cloud based applications.

Visualization Technologies for Automotive & Aerospace Applications

EEvision
EEvision takes development CAD data as input and automatically renders visual depictions of circuits and wiring harnesses on-the-fly. The ability to quickly dial up specific design views is critical to the smooth development & diagnosis of complex systems.

E-engine
E-engine is an option to Nlview that allows the automatic generation of E/E architecture schematic diagrams. E-engine enables software developers to easily build automotive & aerospace development and service tools or cloud based applications.

Key Executives
Gerhard Angst, President and CEO
Gerhard is a co-founder of Concept Engineering, where he has served as President & Chief Executive Officer since 1990. His background is in electronics, particularly digital and analog IC design, and he is responsible for overseeing the company’s operations and international relations.

Lothar Linhard, VP Engineering and CTO
Lothar serves as VP, Engineering and Chief Technical Officer since he co-founded the company in 1990. With a strong background in software engineering and EDA technology, and with over 25 years experience he oversees and coordinates all technology and product development.

Company Website

Concept Engineering on SemiWiki