Free Waveform Viewer Adds Formats, Speed

A new version of WaveViewer, SynaptiCAD’s free waveform viewing tool, reads several additional waveform formats, features enhanced performance, and adds waveform browsing features. The program now reads both analog and digital data captured by Agilent Technologies’ mixed-signal oscilloscopes and also supports timing parameter data from Altera (.tao) and Xilinx (.txt). Also, the tool boasts 5x to 20x faster waveform rendering for waveforms containing bus data or analog information. In addition, compressed files are up to 50x smaller than in previous versions. The PLI shared library that simulators use to directly create the tool’s native compressed btim format was also optimized to reduce simulation overhead. Improvements to the browsing and annotation functions include sorting visible signals by name, a search tool for finding signals and signal values, and improvements to waveform information dialogs. The free WaveViewer program is currently available on Windows Vista/XP/2000, Linux, Solaris, and HPUX. A commercial version, GigaWave Viewer, can handle extremely large waveform data files, such as multi-gigabyte VCD files.