Denali Software, a provider of electronic design automation (EDA) tools and intellectual property (IP) for chip interface design and verification, announced that NVIDIA Corporation has signed a multi-year agreement to license Denali’s verification tools for use in its chip design efforts. NVIDIA engineers are now using Denali's PureSpec product to verify the correct operation of the PCI Express interface in its chip designs. The tool helps NVIDIA engineers catch potential bugs early in the development cycle before the design is implemented in silicon.

The PCI Express architecture is a new serial interconnect technology that replaces the current AGP and PCI standards in mainboards for the next generation of graphics and other I/O applications. Obviously, NVIDIA not only needs PCI Express verification tools for its graphics processing units scheduled to come around Q2 2004, but also for its core-logic products due in the first half of next year. Acquisition of verification tools now means that none of NVIDIA’s PCI Express-supporting products have been taped out successfully yet.

Earlier this year I heard a rumour that another major graphics company tests its actual PCI Express graphics products it had taped out before with a major CPU company, an inventor of PCI Express standard. Yet another provider of professional graphics cards, 3Dlabs, a subsidiary of Creative Technology, said this February it would develop VPUs and graphics cards for PCI Express standard (see this news-story), but no information about actual devices have been issued since then.