CVCBLR's VoW blog - Verification on the Web!

As some of us have seen over last decade, approximately 5 years ago industry was upbeat about code/RTL linting with almost every EDA vendor offering products in this space. Some of them were start-ups acquired by big vendors (like LEDA.fr to Synopsys). At the end the Linting market proved too small for the 3 biggies and their focus on that technology got sidelined. In all, one company survived this wave well and that’s Atrenta – its SpyGlass product increased leaps and bounds both in its capabilities and installed base. Today SpyGlass is an undisputed leader in Linting and has enjoyed monopoly for more than 5 years, well done Atrenta! Come recession, silently few smaller EDA vendors started investing on this niche segment and now we have ALINT from Aldec and Ascent from RealIntent. I’m personally thrilled to see more players on this technology – though the $$ may not be too high, the potential user base is large and investment is not all that HIGH as in a SystemVerilog simulator for ...

CVC is pleased to announce online Webinar on "SystemVerilog Interfaces" along with Aldec as our partner. With ever growing interest in the true power of SystemVerilog here is your opportunity to get started with SystemVerilog in good style with no additional cost - it is a FREE Webinar and is scheduled in 3 different times to suit various timezones across the globe - ASIA, Europe & USA.Register online NOW to book your seat! ASIA - India 9.30-10.30 AM, China: 12.00 to 13.00 Europe - 15.00 to 16.00 CET USA - 9.00 - 10.00 AM, PST Click here for an abstract of the Webinar. It will be presented by Srinivasan Venkataramanan from CVC and Jaroslaw K, from Aldec.

Assertion Based Verification has certainly been one of the mostly debated topics over the last half-a-decade. So much so that one of the past DVCons was full of SystemVerilog & PSL papers on ABV that someone commented it is “ABV conference” than DVCon (was it DVCon 2005?2006?) Even then the adoption rate has been slower than expected – agreed by many stats, EDA folks etc. A relatively new EDA vendor is addressing it via some tools, see: http://www.zocalo-tech.com/index.php   Not clear how easy it will be and how much ROI users will see, but an interesting development I must say. With SystemVerilog 2009 LRM adding checker constructs we predict that the adoption of OVL-like libraries should dramatically improve. We explained it thoroughly in our SVA handbook 2nd edition, see: http://www.cvcblr.com/blog__resources   We have a DVCon 2010 paper on this very topic, see: http://dvcon.org/events/eventdetails.aspx?id=108-3   Let’s see how fast the checker gets imple...

For those of us who have been following the EDA marketing over several years, it is no surprise that there are dedicated marketing professionals within big EDA companies focussing on conveying message/confusing the ecosystem if needed (unfortunately). We have several anecdotes starting from “VHDL is dead” back in 2003 ( http://www.eetimes.eu/uk/17408257 ) and guess what, last month we had a full-house “Advanced VHDL TB class” ( http://www.cvcblr.com/blog/?p=86 ) and another one being scheduled in Jan 2010. I don’t intend to blame any single entity/individual for this, rather this is how it works, and those of us who have seen it for years understand it. Another classical case was for IEEE-1850 PSL – it is alive and kicking with becoming part of recent VHDL as well. Though not much development on PSL itself, but it is expected to stay for much longer than what some folks have predicted. Need a proof – name an EDA vendor without support for PSL – Mentor, Cadence, Synopsys, Aldec – all ha...

Good news for all those Emacs + SystemVerilog users. Puneet has just now released his SV Snippet for Emacs, see: http://coverification.org/2009/12/17/systemverilog-snippets-for-emacs/ Will certainly try it out ASAP. Good start Puneet, keep it up. Thanks for sharing it!

Interesting analysis of how Verification effort is being spent across industry: http://tinyurl.com/dbg-it-man (See the pie-chart, Figure 2). It goes very much inline with what we have been hearing from customers, competitors and also from our own own experience. So DEBUG is THE area if one were to automate within Functional Verification. I’m little surprised to see a 15% spent on ENV – perhaps it is the case for modern SystemVerilog/VMM/OVM stuff, but again that’s for the initial period I suppose. My belief is if you reuse VIPs, leverage on previous code and hire the right candidate, the ENV creation can be handled within 10% The testcase development is shown as 18%, not clear if some of it spread into the coverage bucket (another 15%) – as there is a strong correlation among the two anyway. I believe this is where technologies like Breker’s trek http://www.cvcblr.com/blog/?p=89 becomes interesting.   On the debug – the good old Novas/SpringSoft is still the leader with S...

  In case you missed it: http://chipdesignmag.com/display.php?articleId=3723 I mentioned this during our recent Advanced VHDL TB class during PSL session and attendees were very interested. Today I got a mail back from Chandramohan asking for the link, sent to him and read it once again (must admit, not in full indepth PCI-e level). Overall an excellent paper, perhaps a strong candidate for a DVCon Best paper award – real design bugs/scenarios listed..truly worth reading. Such a nice paper didn’t have to have the following on simulation Simulation, the alternative, brute force approach, ends up wasting resources and introduces additional risk. Even for cases where you think you understand the full state-space, it requires huge effort to develop a test strategy, e.g. complex test scenario with nested loops etc. Manual effort and test are required. Simulation cycles are long and regression test after modifications is slow. Furthermore, the designer generally has to edit do...