Posts Tagged ‘Verification Academy’
Part 1: The 2012 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study
Design Trends
In my previous blog, I introduced the 2012 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study (click here). The objective of my previous blog was to provide background on this large, worldwide industry study. I will present the key findings from this study in a set of upcoming blogs.
This blog begins the process of revealing the 2012 Wilson Research Group study findings by first focusing on current design trends. Let’s begin by examining process geometry adoption trends, as shown in Figure 1. Here, you will see trend comparisons between the 2007 Far West Research study (gray line), the 2010 Wilson Research Group study (blue line), and the 2012 Wilson Research Group study (green line).
Figure 1. Process geometry trends
Worldwide, the median process geometry size from the 2007 Far West Research study was about 90nm, while the median process geometry size is about 65nm in 2010. Today, the mean process geometry size for a typical project is about 45nm—although you can see that over a third of projects today are designing below 32nm.
In addition to the industry moving to smaller process geometries, the industry is also moving to larger design sizes as measured in number of gates of logic and datapath, excluding memories (which should not be a surprise). Figure 2 compares design sizes from the 2002 Collett study (dark blue line), the 2007 Far West Research study (gray line), the 2010 Wilson Research Group study (light blue line), and the 2012 Wilson Research Group study (green line).
Figure 2. Number of gates of logic and datapath trends, excluding memories
The study revealed that about a third of the non-FPGA designs today are less than 5M gates, while a third range in size between 5M to 20M gates, and about a third of all designs are larger than 20M gates.
It’s important to note here that the data on the mean design size trends does not reflect volume in terms of semiconductor production. For example, you could have fewer projects designing at a small geometry, yet they have higher volume in terms of production.
In Figure 3, I show the mean design size trends between the 2002 Collett study (dark blue line), the 2007 Far West Research study (gray line), the 2010 Wilson Research Group study (light blue line), and the 2012 Wilson Research Group study (green line). Obviously, gate counts have increased over the years, yet a significant number of designs continue to be developed with smaller (and larger) gate counts as indicated by the mean calculation. Another observation is that, as you would expect, the mean gate count trend is essentially following Moore’s law.
Figure 3. Mean design size trends
Figure 4 presents the current design implementation trends for non-FPGAs as identified by the survey participants.
Figure 4. Non-FPGA current design implementation trends
The data in Figure 4 presents trends in design implementation approaches for non-FPGA designs, ranging from the 2002 Collett study (dark blue bar), the 2004 Collet study (dark green bar), the 2007 Far West Research study (gray bar), the 2010 Wilson Research Group study (blue bar), and the 2012 Wilson Research Group study (green bar). Note that the study seems to indicate that there is a downward trend in standard cell design implementation.
Figure 5. FPGA design implementation trends
For the 2012 study, we decided that we wanted to get a sense of the percentage of FPGA projects that target the very complex programmable SoC FPGAs that have recently emerged, which is shown in Figure 5. Examples of these programmable SoC FPGAs include: Xilinx’s Zynq, Altera’s Arria/Cydone, and Microsemi’s SmarFusion.
In my next blog (click here), I’ll continue discussing current design trends, focusing specifically on embedded processors, power, and clock domains.
Tags: accellera, functional verification, IEEE, IEEE 1800, Verification, Verification Academy
Prologue: The 2012 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study
This is the first in a series of blogs that presents the results from the 2012 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study.
Study Overview
In 2002 and 2004, Ron Collett International, Inc. conducted its well known ASIC/IC functional verification studies, which provided invaluable insight into the state of the electronic industry and its trends in design and verification. However, after the 2004 study, no other industry studies were conducted, which left a void in identifying industry trends.
To address this void, Mentor Graphics commissioned Far West Research to conduct an industry study on functional verification in the fall of 2007. Then in the fall of 2010, Mentor commissioned Wilson Research Group to conduct another functional verification study. Both of these studies were conducted as blind studies to avoid influencing the results. This means that the survey participants did not know that the study was commissioned by Mentor Graphics. In addition, to support trend analysis on the data, both studies followed the same format and questions (when possible) as the original 2002 and 2004 Collett studies.
In the fall of 2012, Mentor Graphics commissioned Wilson Research Group again to conduct a new functional verification study. This study was also a blind study and follows the same format as the Collett, Far West Research, and previous Wilson Research Group studies. The 2012 Wilson Research Group study is one of the largest functional verification studies ever conducted. The overall confidence level of the study was calculated to be 95% with a margin of error of 4.05%.
Unlike the previous Collett and Far West Research studies that were conducted only in North America, both the 2010 and 2012 Wilson Research Group studies were worldwide studies. The regions targeted were:
- North America:Canada,United States
- Europe/Israel:Finland,France,Germany,Israel,Italy,Sweden,UK
- Asia (minusIndia):China,Korea,Japan,Taiwan
- India
The survey results are compiled both globally and regionally for analysis.
Another difference between the Wilson Research Group and previous industry studies is that both of the Wilson Research Group studies also included FPGA projects. Hence for the first time, we are able to present some emerging trends in the FPGA functional verification space.
Figure 1 shows the percentage makeup of survey participants by their job description. The red bars represents the FPGA participants while the green bars represent the non-FPGA (i.e., IC/ASIC) participants.
Figure 1: Survey participants job title description
Figure 2 shows the percentage makeup of survey participants by company type. Again, the red bars represents the FPGA participants while the green bars represents the non-FPGA (i.e., IC/ASIC) participants.
Figure 2: Survey participants company description
In a future set of blogs, over the course of the next few months, I plan to present the highlights from the 2012 Wilson Research Group study along with my analysis, comments, and obviously, opinions. A few interesting observations emerged from the study, which include:
- FPGA projects are beginning to adopt advanced verification techniques due to increased design complexity.
- The effort spent on verification is increasing.
- The industry is converging on common processes driven by maturing industry standards.
My next blog presents current design trends that were identified by the survey. This will be followed by a set of blogs focused on the functional verification results.
Also, to learn more about the 2012 Wilson Reserach Group study, view my pre-recorded Functional Verification Study web-seminar, which is located out on the Verification Academy website.
Quick links to the 2012 Wilson Research Group Study results (so far…)
- Part 1 – Design Trends
Tags: accellera, Assertion-Based Verification, formal verification, functional coverage, functional verification, IEEE, Simulation, Standards, SystemVerilog, UVM, Verification Academy, Verification Methodology, verilog, vhdl
Coverage Cookbook Debuts
Verification Academy Adds Major New Technical Resource
The Verification Academy adds another major methodology cookbook to focus on effective coverage adoption. The Coverage Cookbook describes the different types of coverage that are available to track your verification process progress, how to create a functional coverage model from a specification, and provides examples to implement functional coverage for different types of designs.
Verification Academy “full access” members have access to the free Coverage Cookbook and the UVM/OVM Cookbooks as well. Are you a registered full access member? If not, register now to become a full access member. (Restrictions apply.)
Coverage is not a new topic. It was one of major additions to the SystemVerilog (IEEE Std. 1800™-2009) standard. But the SystemVerilog functional coverage extensions were left to the verification engineer to use in such as way to return meaningful measurements of how much of the design specification was being tested. The Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) offers greater structure for coverage over SystemVerilog, but it too, is still only a piece of the puzzle.
As verification teams have come to generate greater amounts of information from use of SystemVerilog, UVM and other verification tools, the data from the verification runs needs to be easily used to drive coverage closure. Within the Mentor Graphics Questa verification platform, this resulted in the development of the Unified Coverage Database (UCDB) and associated verification management and planning features.
Since verification teams use a variety of tools and technology from many sources, it was an imperative that verification information could be easily shared and combined to help drive faster coverage closure across the industry. This is why Mentor Graphics donated its UCDB API to Accellera where it became the Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard (UCIS).
It would be great to think that we are done; but we’re not. Tools and data are just two dimensions of the three dimensions to any IC design project. A comprehensive approach to verification management that handles all of this adds the third dimension. The Mentor Graphics Questa Verification Management features handle all this.
Now the question is how to best adopt and use all the capabilities at hand from the standards to the verification technology at your finger tips.
The Verification Academy Coverage Cookbook is one of the important tools you now have to help pull all the information into a single place where you can learn the theory and put that theory into practice. The Coverage Cookbook is much like the OVM/UVM Cookbooks in that it is web friendly, while supporting the ability for you to generate a PDF file of the whole document in case you want to have a printed copy or have it available for offline reference.
The Theory section covers:
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The Practice section shows three examples you can use today:
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The Coverage Cookbook is a live document. You can expect continued extensions and contributions to enhance it. As Harry Foster, Mentor Graphics’ Chief Scientist Verification put it, “Methodology is the bridge between tools and technologies, which creates a productive, predictable, and repeatable solution.” We should expect that our collective use of this technology will help hone the methodology which is the heart of the Coverage Cookbook. And with this use, we should expect the Coverage Cookbook to evolve as we achieve greater verification productivity.
Let us know what you think about the Coverage Cookbook and what we might be able to do to improve it. In the meantime, Happy Coverage Closing!
Tags: accellera, Coverage, Coverage Closure, Coverage Cookbook, functional coverage, Harry Foster, IEEE 1800, OVM, SystemVerilog, UCDB, UCIS, UVM, Verification Academy
Introducing “Verification Academy 2.0”
A new style takes center stage
It was Fashion Week in Portland, Oregon in early October. And while the thought of Portland and fashion might not be believable to many in the world, especially those who look to the design houses of Paris or Milan, it was. What struck me was the blend of fashion with high tech this year. Intel took the opportunity to roll out its fashion inspired campaign (dressing room mirror sized tablets) and Mitsubishi used it to launch its new electric vehicle (named MiEV in case you did not know). Certainly it was more than just your run-of-the-mill runway show. But that was not the only thing “getting some style” here in the Portland area.
The Verification Academy team at Mentor Graphics has been working hard as well to restyle the Verification Academy website, modernize it and make content easily accessible. It made its debut in late September, a few weeks before the Portland Fashion Show. While these two things are a coincidence, the focus on a refreshed style should not to be totally unexpected.
Some of the changes just had to be made given the success of the Verification Academy. When it started a few years back, Harry Foster (the face in the picture of the Verification Academy website above) knew the adoption of advanced technology was hampered by unequal and slow distribution of knowledge. Part of the Verification Academy’s thrust was to bring information about advanced verification topics to the whole world in a format that could be easily used. The content comes from respected verification subject matter experts and the first “runaway success” was the Open Verification Methodology (OVM) training by John Aynsley from Doulos for the “basic” module and Tom Fitzpatrick from Mentor Graphics for the “advanced” module. The Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) course, likewise, has also joined the ranks of the highly watched. Updates to the Academy improve the services to deliver video.
We have moved to the most current web video protocols that allow modern browsers and mobile devices to easily access course content. You can watch courses on the “smaller” smartphone screens to the largest of TV displays with SD and HD video to support your viewing preferences. Since content is delivered in native web technologies, users do not have to depend on Flash or other plugins.
We have also migrated the Academy to the leading open source content management system and adopted the use SSL throughout the Verification Academy to make it more secure.
When we first started the Verification Academy, we did not know how large the community would grow nor could we predict the demands the community would place on the resources to support it. Today, there are almost 12.5K users making it the largest single site to support the verification professional. The changes we have made to the internals of the site show a speed improvement of over 400% by exploiting a commercial content delivery network to handle large media.
And for many members, where English is a second language, the video captions, when offered, are in plain text. Registered users can click on the picture to the right to see the UVM Introduction and enable closed caption to see how the text appears right below the video. (Or, from reading the text below video in the picture to the right, you can see John is introducing himself at the moment of this screen capture.)
We have also made big improvements to searches. The searching facility now scans across all content at once, from the forums, to the UVM/OVM Cookbook and presents the information to you in an improved way to allow you to filter the results to focus on just that you want to know.
Want to experience the new Verification Academy 2.0 style? Click here to go to the Verification Academy to see these changes and discover these and other changes yourself. Share your comments with me on what you think. Have we made it better for you? And if not, what more can we do to improve your experience even more?
Tags: OVM, UVM, UVM Cookbook, Verification, Verification Academy
Virtual Emulation for Debugging
A system-level verification engineer once told me that his company consumes over 50% of its emulation capacity debugging failures. According to him there was just no way around consuming emulators while debugging their SoC design emulation runs. In fact when failures occur during emulation, verification engineers often turn to live debugging with JTAG interfaces to the Design Under Test. This enables one engineer to debug one problem at a time, while consuming expensive emulation capacity for extended periods of time. After all, when some of the intricate interactions between system software and design hardware fail, it can take days if not weeks to debug. To say this is painful, slow, and expensive would be an understatement.
Would you be interested to learn about a better alternative for debugging SoC emulation runs? Veloce Codelink offers instant replay capability for emulation. This allows multiple engineers to debug multiple problems at the same time, without consuming any emulation capacity, leaving the emulators to be used where they’re most needed – running more regression tests. And Veloce Codelink is non-invasive – no additional clock cycles needed to extract emulation data.
If you consume as much time debugging emulation failures as the system-level verification engineer above, Veloce Codelink could double your emulation capacity, too. To learn more about Veloce Codelink’s “virtual emulation” that enables “DVR” control of emulation runs, check out our On-Demand Web Seminar titled “Off-line Debug of Multi-Core SoCs with Veloce Emulation“. In this web seminar you’ll also learn about Veloce Codelink’s “flight data recording” technology that enables long emulation runs to be debugged, without requiring huge amount of memory to store all of the data.
http://www.mentor.com/products/fv/multimedia/veloce-codelink-web-seminar
Tags: emulation, functional verification, Instant Replay, JTAG, SoC, Verification, Verification Academy
Verification Academy: Up Close & Personal
Live & In-Person at DAC 2012!
Verification Academy, the brain child of Harry Foster, Chief Verification Scientist at Mentor Graphics, was live from the Design Automation Conference tradeshow floor this year. Harry is pictured to the right giving an update on his popular verification survey from the DAC tradeshow floor.
The Verification Academy, predominantly a web-based resource is a popular site for verification information with more than 11,000 registered members for forum access on topics ranging from OVM/UVM, SystemVerilog and Analog/Mixed-Signal design. The popular OVM/UVM Cookbook, which used to be available as a print edition, is now a live online resource there as well. A whole host of educational modules and seminars can also be found there too.
If you know about the Verification Academy, you know all about the content mentioned above and that there is much more to be found there. For those who don’t know as much about it, Harry took a break from the being at the Verification Academy booth at DAC to discuss the Verification Academy with Luke Collins, Technology Journalist, Tech Design Forum. (Flash is required to watch Harry discuss Verification Academy with Luke.)
The Verification Academy at DAC was a great venue to connect in person with other Verification Academy users to discuss standards, methodologies, flows and other industry trends. Each hour there were short presentations by Verification Academy members that proved to be a popular way to start some interesting conversations. While we realize not all Verification Academy members were able to attend DAC in person, we know many have expressed an interest to some of the presentations. Verification Academy “Total Access” members now have access to many of the presentations.
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ARM |
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Doulos |
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Thales Alenia Space |
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Test & Verification Solutions |
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Willamette HDL |
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Sunburst Design |
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Mentor Graphics |
Total Access members can also download all the presentations in a .zip file. Happy reading to all those who were unable to visit us at DAC and thank you to all who were able to stop by and visit.
Tags: ABV, ACE, ams, ARM, Assertion-Based Verification, Coverage Closure, dac, Doulos, formal, IEEE, iTBA, Low Power, OVM, SystemVerilog, Tech Design Forum, Thales, upf, UVM, UVM Express, Verification Academy, Verification Trends
Intelligent Testbench Automation – Catching on Fast
Graph-Based Intelligent Testbench Automation
While intelligent testbench automation is still reasonably new when measured in EDA years, this graph-based verification technology is being adopted by more and more verification teams every day. And the interest is global. Verification teams from Europe, North America, and the Pacific Rim are now using iTBA to help them verify their newest electronic designs in less time and with fewer resources. (If you haven’t adopted it yet, your competitors probably have.) If you have yet to learn how this new technology can help you achieve higher levels of verification, despite increasing design complexity, I’d suggest you check out a recent article in the June 2012 issue of Verification Horizons titled “Is Intelligent Testbench Automation For You?” The article focuses on where iTBA is best applied and where it will help you most by producing optimal results, and how design applications with a large verification space, functionally oriented coverage goals, and unbalanced conditions can often experience a 100X gain in coverage closure acceleration. For more detail about these and other considerations, you’ll have to read the article.
Fitzpatrick’s Corollary
And while you’re there, you might also notice that the entire June 2012 issue of Verification Horizons is devoted to helping you achieve the highest levels of coverage as efficiently as possible. Editor and fellow verification technologist Tom Fitzpatrick succinctly adapts Murphy’s Law to verification, writing “If It Isn’t Covered, It Doesn’t Work”. And any experienced verification engineer (or manager) knows just how true this is, making it critical that we thoughtfully prioritize our verification goals, and achieve them as quickly and efficiently as possible. The June 2012 issue offers nine high quality articles, with a particular focus on coverage.
Berg’s Proof
Another proof that iTBA is catching on globally, is the upcoming TVS DVClub event being held next Monday 2 July 2012, in Bristol, Cambridge, and Grenoble. The title of the event is “Graph-Based Verification”, and three industry experts will discuss different ways you can take advantage of what graph-based intelligent testbench automation has to offer. My colleague and fellow verification technologist Staffan Berg leads off the event with a proof of his own, as he will present how graph-based iTBA can significantly shorten your time-to-coverage. Staffan will show you how to use graph-based verification to define your stimulus space and coverage goals, by highlighting examples from some of the verification teams that have already adopted this technology, as I mentioned above. He’ll also show how you can introduce iTBA into your existing verification environment, so you can realize these benefits without disrupting your existing process. I have already registered and plan to attend the TVS DVClub event, but I’ll have to do some adapting of my own as the event runs from 11:30am to 2:00pm BST in the UK. But I’ve seen Staffan present before, and both he and intelligent testbench automation are worth getting up early for. Hope to see you there, remotely speaking.
Tags: functional verification, Intelligent Testbench Automation, iTBA, testbench, UVM, Verification, Verification Academy
Off to DAC!
Where might our paths cross?
It is always challenge to fit all the needed visits in during the Design Automation Conference (DAC). If you happen to like some of the same events I attend, then the chances are good our paths might cross in public.
Saturday and Sunday are busy with an Accellera Systems Initiative board meeting. Split across two days, Accellera board members will meet to conduct traditional business and do some strategic planning in which each board member outlines what they aspire the goals and objectives for the group should be in the coming year. Intel has graciously granted space in their San Francisco offices, so I won’t be around the Moscone Center during the pre-conference setup phase. (By the way, Thank you Intel!)
After we close the Accellera board meeting on Sunday, I plan to attend the pre-DAC events on Sunday that include the EDAC reception (registration required) at 6:00pm (San Francisco Marriott, Salon 7) and Gary Smith’s “Sunday Night at DAC” at 7:00pm (San Francisco Marriott, Salon 6).
During the conference I will spend most of my time at the Mentor Graphics Verification Academy Booth #1514 and on Wednesday split my time between there and the Accellera Systems Imitative meetings. And just in case you may note that most of my evenings are not scheduled, they are with customer activities.
When the show floor is open, you will find me most of the time at the Verification Academy Booth #1514. I will join Mentor’s Harry Foster there were user and partner presentations will be done on UVM applications, updates on Harry’s research results, updates on important verification standards from Mentor’s perspective and more. You are invited to join other verification experts for the Tuesday evening cocktail reception at the Verification Academy Booth. (And the cocktail hour may be just the thing that tis needed before the annual DAC Birds-Of-A-Feather meetings begin to help the conversations start.)
Verification Academy DAC Schedule
| Monday, June 4th | Tuesday, June 5th | Wednesday, June 6th |
10:00 – Simulation and Formal Assertion-Based VerificationHarry Foster, Mentor Graphics |
9:30 – Using the UVM Register Layer
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10:00 – Bringing UVM to Life
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11:00 – Bringing UVM to Life
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10:00 – Generating Coverage Models and Achieving Coverage Closure
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11:00 – Resistance is Futile: Learning to love UVM!
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2:00 – Verification of Low Power SoCs with IEEE UPF
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2:00 – Bringing UVM to Life
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2:00 – Automating Assertion Based Verification with NextOp and Mentor Graphics
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3:00 - Evolving Trends in Functional Verification
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3:00 - Evolving Trends in Functional Verification
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3:00 – UVM Express
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4:00 – An Introduction to AMBA 4 AXI Coherency Extensions (ACE) and Verification Challenges
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4:00 - Evolving Trends in Functional Verification
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5:00 - Using Rules-Based Integration to Develop a SoC-Level UVM Verification Environment
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5:00 – Meet the Verification Experts Cocktail Reception |
Accellera Systems Initiative will host a set of meetings on Wednesday starting with a luncheon to roll out the Unified Coverage Operability Standard (UCIS). The lunch is free and seating is limited and registration is required.
Hosted Luncheon and Technical Presentation
Accellera Systems Initiative Rolls Out the Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard
Speaker: Dr. Richard Ho, Co-Chair of the UCIS Technical Subcommittee
Wednesday, June 6, 12:00-1:30pm
Moscone Center, Room 250
Register Now >
This luncheon is open to all DAC attendees. Seating is limited! You must pre-register for this event.
Coverage metrics are critical to measuring and guiding design verification. As designs have grown, increasingly advanced verification technologies, methods and additional metrics have been designed to form a fuller coverage model. There is currently no single metric that consistently and globally tells engineers the exact status of verification. But one step in the right direction is to bring all types of coverage metrics into a single database that can be accessed in an industry standard way. The UCIS facilitates the creation of a unified coverage database that allows for interoperability of coverage data across multiple tools from multiple vendors.
This presentation, intended for verification managers and tool developers alike, provides an introduction to and overview of the UCIS and how users plan to utilize it to enhance their verification flows. We provide a survey of many of the commonly-used coverage metrics and how they are modeled in the UCIS. The information that users will be able to access through the UCIS will allow them to write their own applications to analyze, grade, merge and report coverage from one or more databases from one or more tool vendors. We will also discuss the XML-based interchange format of UCIS, which provides a path to exchange coverage databases without requiring a common code library between tools and vendors.
SystemC User Group Meeting
NASCUG XVIII
North American SystemC User’s Group Meeting
Wednesday, June 6, 2:00-6:00pm
Moscone Center, Room 262
Register Now >
This event is open to all DAC attendees. Seating is limited!
The North American SystemC Users Group (NASCUG) provides a unique forum for sharing SystemC experiences and knowledge among industry, research and universities. The agendafor the event has a lot offer user group attendees.
Mentor’s Adam Erickson will present An Open-Source, Standards-Based Library for Achieving Interoperability Between TLM Models in SystemC and SystemVerilog. Adam’s presentation is scheduled to start at 3:00pm.
Tags: accellera, dac, edac, gary smith, Standards, systemc, TLM, UCIS, upf, UVM, Verification Academy
Expanding the Verification Academy!
The philosophy behind our Verification Academy is to provide a comprehensive resource for evolving and maturing your functional verification process skills. We believe that each step an organization takes in evolving verification skills should have measurable results and benefits. With that in mind, I am excited to announce two new modules we are adding to the Verification Academy: UVM Express and Advanced UVM.
Figure 1. Screen shot for the Verification Academy UVM Epxress module.
For some verification teams, the hurdle to implement a UVM-based verification environment is simply getting started. To eliminate this hurdle, Mentor Graphics has just introduced UVM Express, which is a suggested systematic way to progressively adopt a UVM methodology. The beauty of this approach is that UVM Express makes getting started easy and intuitive, and provides measurable productivity gains to a broader scope of design projects, regardless of their past experience and existing skills with UVM.
Our new UVM Express module consists of four sessions for evolving UVM capability. It is not necessary for a project to implement all the recommendations from the four sessions to receive measurable benefits. For example, a project might decide to only adopt the recommendations presented in the first session in the UVM Express module, and then at some future point, decide to evolve their skills further by adopting the recommendations from the second session.
In addition to the UVM Express module, we have released an Advanced UVM module. This module consists of 10 sessions and provides over three hours of material. In this module, we build on the concepts originally covered in our Basic UVM Module to take your UVM understanding to the next level. You will learn how to build tests and verification environments, use the factory and configuration database to customize your verification IP, and create reusable stimulus sequences, including those for multi-layer protocols. We will also introduce the UVM Register layer, showing you how to create a register model and how to write and reuse register-level tests.
We are excited to now offer you three UVM modules within the Verification Academy: Basic UVM, Advanced UVM, and UVM Express. And as always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions.
For more information, visit http://www.verificationacademy.com/.
Tags: UVM, Verification Academy
Introducing UVM Connect
In his recent post on UVM: Some Thoughts Before DVCon, Dennis outlined some great ideas about what we think should happen next for UVM. His 3rd point, “UVM needs to bridge the system domain,” is particularly relevant given the newly-formed Accellera Systems Initiative. This is actually an area we’ve been contemplating for a while here at Mentor, and as Dennis indicated, we shared our thoughts on this topic at our last face-to-face with the VIP-TSC. With demand coming from our users, and some positive feedback on our proposal, we have just released UVM Connect, an open-source library that provides TLM1 and TLM2 connectivity and object passing between SystemC and SystemVerilog models and components, as well as a UVM Command API for accessing and controlling UVM simulation from SystemC (or C or C++).
You can find much more information on the UVM Connect page of Verification Academy.
Mentor has always believed that SystemVerilog and SystemC each have their own strengths and that the most productive way to combine them in a system-level environment is to preserve the strengths of each while allowing the free exchange of data between them. Instead of trying to re-implement UVM in SystemC, or to extend SystemC to try and recreate SystemVerilog functional coverage or constrained-random stimulus, UVM Connect provides the framework needed to interoperate between languages. This lets you:
- Reuse your SystemC architectural models as reference models in UVM verification
- Reuse your stimulus generation agents in SystemVerilog to verify models in SystemC
- Have access to a wider array of VIP since you are no longer confined to a single language
- Utilize and interact with the UVM infrastructure from SystemC, including wait for and control UVM phase transitions, set and get configuration, issue UVM-style reports, set factory type and instance overrides, and more
UVM Connect provides object-based data transfer across the language boundary via TLM1 and TLM2 interfaces, which are natively supported in both languages. It works out-of-the-box with UVM 1.1a and later and lets you use your existing TLM models, regardless of language, in a mixed-language context without modification. In a nutshell, UVM Connect fulfills the principles and purpose of the TLM interface standard, letting you design independent models that communicate without directly referring to each other. The models thus work equally well in both native and mixed-language environments.I encourage you to download the kit and give it a try. In the spirit of “co-op-etition” I also encourage our competitors to qualify the library on their simulators.
In addition to the great material in the UVM/OVM Online Methodology Cookbook on Verification Academy, the kit also includes an HTML User’s Guide, based on extensive, well-documented examples, that includes detailed information on all aspects of the API. Please make sure to stop by the Mentor booth at DVCon and let us know what you think.
Tags: dvcon, functional verification, systemc, SystemVerilog, UVM, UVM Connect, UVM-1.1, Verification Academy, Verification Methodology
About Verification Horizons BLOG
This blog will provide an online forum to provide weekly updates on concepts, values, standards, methodologies and examples to assist with the understanding of what advanced functional verification technologies can do and how to most effectively apply them. We're looking forward to your comments and suggestions on the posts to make this a useful tool.
Latest Posts
- Part 1: The 2012 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study
- What’s the deal with those wire’s and reg’s in Verilog
- Getting AMP’ed Up on the IEEE Low-Power Standard
- Prologue: The 2012 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study
- Even More UVM Debug in Questa 10.2
- IEEE Approves New Low Power Standard
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