CVCBLR's VoW blog - Verification on the Web!

At DVCon-14, leading EDA vendor MENT has taken the initiative to propose a Test Specification Standard (see: http://www.goo.gl/BKuNEd ). Given that SV & UVM are well established and deep into their development, stability and adoption phase, the innovation has to come at next level of abstraction. Over the last decade, we at CVC have been working with customers (semiconductor design houses) and EDA partners in defining, evangelizing and deploying multitude of technologies and languages such as OVL, e/Specman, eRM, PSL, SVA, SV, VMM, OVM, AVM, UVM etc. While most of them address the key aspects of "how verification shall be effectively carried out", the next level of "What defines my verification space" has been left for adjacent technologies. Now with this new initiative we are starting to see this problem being addressed. Here is a quick summary of various attempts that have been made to address this problem so far. Hopefully the new Accellera committee will loo...

In one of our recently concluded UVM training sessions at CVC a customer asked how easy is it to migrate an existing proven code base running with VMM to UVM. Since this is a very common situation, we at CVC have put together a detailed set of case studies and a half-a-day workshop on this topic. As a starting point we ask few simple questions to the customer on their code base so that we can provide an estimated effort involved in the migration. Invariably we start asking “Which VMM version do you run?” – and many are actually unaware :-( Here is a tiny piece of code that would get the answer right from your simulation: A small VMM-built-in utility class is provided as part of VMM named vmm_version . It has few interesting methods, First one being:     The first one displays the major-minor versions such as 1.11 and vendor name. Typically EDA vendors customize these opensource libraries to add debug features and at times to fix incompatibilities across implementations. ...

To all the ASIC Verification enthusiasts interested in pushing the limits beyond existing languages and methodologies, here is your chance to contribute and be part of the change. As many would be aware, IEEE 1647 standard defines Functional Verification language e . For over a decade e language has provided many advanced features for verification engineers that have recently been adopted to other languages such as SystemVerilog as well. The most recent one being “soft constraints” – see: http://www.cvcblr.com/blog/?p=629   And as more customers demand more features, the working group on e language has been busy adding new proposals. In our last group meeting we agreed on having four working sub-groups. http://www.eda.org/twiki/bin/view.cgi/P1647/Meeting78Minutes These are:- 1)      Temporal Working Group 2)      Messaging Working Group 3)      Types and Operators Working Group 4)    ...

Recently a customer sought a help on how does the UVM’s built-in scoreboard mechanism works, specifically in_order and algorithmic comparators. While he was able to use them well in his design, it when things fail – i.e. he potentially found a design bug he needed additional assistance in debug. By default the UVM framework provides compare() routine for transaction/ uvm_sequence_item . However unlike its predecessor HVLs such as the “E” language (IEEE 1647) or the OpenVera, System Verilog does not have the compare routine built-in to the language itself (for classes). Hence UVM adds it via base class and more. So when we have a transaction model such as: Now by virtue of inheritance, a handy method my_xactn::compare is available.  So one can use it to compare 2 objects of this type as shown below:   Note: in the above code snippet the return value of compare is unused, in actual code of-course you should assert it/throw an `uvm_error etc. Now, when we simulate this wit...

Victor Lyuboslavsky, Victor EDA, technology partner, guest blogger at CVC Ever wondered if you can run Verilog Sims from a Web Browser? Well , playing with Verilog and OVL has gotten a little easier recently thanks to the introduction of EDA Playground . EDA Playground is a web application that allows users to edit, simulate, share, and view waves for their HDL code. It is intended to accelerate the learning of design and testbench development with easier code sharing and with simpler access to simulators and libraries. EDA Playground is free , and, since it is web-browser based, it runs on any OS . And you can be up and running in few minutes, without having to install EDA tools, licenses etc. EDA Playground has two editor panes. The left one is intended for testbench code, and the right one intended for design code. The bottom pane is for simulation results, which are updated in real time when the simulation is running. Running a simulation is easy -- select the simulator on the o...

As part of my recent DAC 2013 minutes, here are some of the musings from customer experiences around DAC this year (and some from projects we have been doing in 2012-13 here). While there is a large set of customers exploring SystemVerilog in its full capacity and with UVM, make no mistake - not many will throw away what has been done previously and that was precisely my talking point at DAC 2013 theater presentation earlier this June. Below are some of the slides I presented to get you started: And it is in this context the recently announced UVM-ML initiative from Accellera http://www.accellera.org/apps/org/workgroup/mlwg/ becomes very relevant to every verification team. It is still very much open and all of you can contribute to developing this to be useful to the verification community at large. You can learn more about this UVM-ML from this Cadence blog:  http://bit.ly/14IdjrA See you soon at UVM-ML conference calls/discussions. TeamCVC

As I recount on my recent DAC at Austin experince, one thing that surprised me was the number of Giraffes (sure, images/toys, wish the real ones..but I was at DAC and not a zoo/safari) in the exhibit floor.   Yes, am talking about the Verific's mascot here. It was one of the tallest standing booths so not many could miss it. My friend Sashi Oblisetty led me to them after our early breakfast meeting that morning at DAC. I met with Michiel Ligthart, Verific’s president and chief operating officer. He is a tall man, a Netherlander/Dutch (Graag, ik kan een klien beetje Nederlands spreken .. -  Glad, I can speak a little bit Dutch language, thanks to my early days of work at Philips, Eindhoven). It was a pleasant surprise to see how many customers Verific has to-date, from their facebook page I found: That's impressive indeed. No wonder I found several small Giraffes on other vendors' booth tables. It reminded me of the popular "Intel inside" campaign, perhaps Verific ...

It surprises me often how many young engineers (read "fresh graduates/Recent College Graduates") struggle when it comes to the UNIX/GCC/Makefiles etc. I still recall our old IIT days when we did Yahoo/Altavista (Google wasn't around back in 1996) search to resolve most of such issues and of-course use some common sense.  Coming to the recent experience, as we were preparing for our recent demo at SNUG India 2013 DCE booth, I asked some of our young team members to run few UVM tests. When it came to the 11th hour preparations I got several error reports from these young engineers with various errors related to gcc/PATH etc. In our regular UVM training sessions the Makefiles exist so not much challenge in this regard. But when you ask these folks to create Makefile on their own to run UVM, things start getting interesting. A recent error message showed to me was:   recompiling module apb_subsystem_top All of 30 modules done  g++ -w -pipe -O -I/home/student/tools/eda/synops...

  UVM Runtime Phasing and Phase Jumping Survey If you are well aware of UVM runtime phasing/phase jumping issues, quickly help yourself and the UVM community at large by filling out this survey: Verilab UVM Phasing Survey Now for a background and for those who are “undecided” whether or not I have an issue with it, here is more information: One of the significant updates done to OVM while bringing up UVM as the standard for verification methodology was the phasing. (For a detailed paper on user issues with OVM phasing approach, see: http://www.synopsys.com/community/snug/india/pages/abstracts.aspx?loc=india&locy=2011 and https://www.synopsys.com/news/pubs/snug/india2011/TA1.2_Intel_paper.pdf ) As with any standard development, there are differing view points coming from various experts, users etc. around the globe.India being the most vibrant Verification geography, it is very probable that many of the verification leads here face these problems day-in and day...

Several engineers working and aspiring to work in the field of ASIC front-end design/verification tend to stay away from Verilog’s powerful PLI/VPI – some of them because they see it as old technology and many others – simply “FEAR” from it, thanks to its complex integration with the tools. For those who believe it is old technology – think again, most of the cutting edge EDA innovations (in front end) happening around verification use Verilog’s PLI/VPI to talk to your underlying simulator. To quote a few examples: NextOp /Atrenta’s BugScope   Novas’s Verdi/Debussy Axiom’s @Designer http://www.axiom-da.com (Debugger that can work with all standard Verilog simulators) Trek from Brekersystems ( www.brekersystems.com ) OnPoint from vennsa-da.com Now for those who “fear” from VPI due to its integration challenges – to be fair – you’ve reasons to do so. However advanced functional verification solutions such as VCS, MPSim ( http://www.axiom-da.com ) provide a...

Earlier this week, Simon Segars, EVP & GM Processor and Physical IP Divisions ( www.linkedin.com/pub/simon-segars/2/2a0/556 ) presented an excellent keynote at an invite-only, executive dinner event around the CDNLive India 2012 http://bit.ly/TxallC organized by Cadence. His theme was around the low power requirements in modern mobile devices (understandably, as the market needs this topic and who is in a better position than ARM can talk about this – being at the center of most of those smartphones!) One of the most interesting parts of his keyonte was the smartphone market segmentation he showed. IIRC (If I Remember Correctly), this was  Gartner backed market estimates/data on how the smartphone market is evolving in the near future. While several enthusiasts around the world are going gangnam about the new iPhone5 which is a high-end smartphone,                     He show...

Earlier this week, Simon Segars, EVP & GM Processor and Physical IP Divisions ( http://linkd.in/ThbmbZ ) presented an excellent keynote at an invite-only, executive dinner event around the CDNLive India 2012 http://bit.ly/TxallC organized by Cadence. Our CTO Srini ( http://linkd.in/e6cSbd ) His theme was around the low power requirements in modern mobile devices (understandably, as the market needs this topic and who is in a better position than ARM can talk about this – being at the center of most of those smartphones!) In a well drafted, upto-the-point, picture-centric presentation Simon did a great job of explaining what ARM’s big.LIITLE architecture is all about! As of today, ARM provides Cortex A-15 like cores for the high-end devices:   Quickly ARM realized there is a strong need for low-energy, low-cost cores too to serve the entry level smartphones – here comes the ARM Cortex A-7   Now with lot of data mining and analysis Simon showed a typical...

They say “ innovation never stops ” – it is true for the SystemVerilog language committee. And it is very true for our co-author Ben Cohen, who even at the retired age keeps updating himself on latest on SV, VMM, OVM, UVM and of-course SVA. Ben Cohen is the Accellera nominated representative for the SV-AC committee on IEEE dev team. See TOC at: http://systemverilog.us/SVA3rdE_preface_toc.pdf The cover of this book is a NASA photograph of Mars, taken by Curiosity. Just like how Mars is enormously big, the verification state space of most of the modern day designs are extremely large. While there have been several advances in the area of "stimulus" or "activation of potential design errors", the amount of checking being done during such activation (either via simulation or formal analysis) demands detailed, precise design specification. This is precisely where SVA fits in the design flow. Just like how the whole world awaits pictures & findings from Curiosity ...

One of the strengths of assertions in SystemVerilog is its well defined sampling semantics. Though it works out-of-the-box and is robust, many users don’t seem to understand it in depth. As we have been blogging on assertions – one needs to be very “pedantic”, i.e. detail oriented to be able to appreciate it, demonstrate it and understand it. We at TeamCVC have been pioneering assertions as a focus area since our PSL book days (end of 2003, http://www.systemverilog.us/psl_info.html ) and it has been almost a decade by now! We cover this in all our training sessions on assertions such as: SVA: http://www.cvcblr.com/trng_profiles/CVC_LG_SVA_profile.pdf PSL: http://www.cvcblr.com/trng_profiles/CVC_LG_PSL_profile.pdf Even during our popular VSV course ( http://www.cvcblr.com/trng_profiles/CVC_LG_VSV_profile.pdf ) we touch upon this topic during the program block discussion. Below is an extract from our training/book on SVA ( http://www.systemverilog.us/sva_info.html ): ...

Last week, our good friend Gaurav Jalan wrote a nice blog at: http://whatisverification.blogspot.in/2012/08/laws-and-verification.html   He has adapted Murphy’s law into Verification as: Applying to Verification ( http://whatisverification.blogspot.in/2012/08/laws-and-verification.html ) Moore’s law – Amount of code to be verified doubles every 2 years. Murphy’s law – Any code that isn’t verified will not work. Now as I recap on last week’s Verilog session delivered to an excited IIT-KGP audience, I realized the same law is applicable to slides/PPT/training too :-) Especially be careful with any code snippet shown in the slides – they  could be wrong – unless verified otherwise ! Now back to the title of this blog entry – what are the differences bet’n Verilog’s $display, $monitor & $strobe ? 1. Usual answer: $monitor is “continuous monitoring” – Yes, good For many fresh graduates the detail stops there – but not for those “verilog hungry, pedanti...