Functional Verification

Highlights From ClubT Hertzelia

2009-11-19T19:52:00Z

Over 125 Verification engineers honored us this past Tuesday by attending the annual "ClubT" in Hertzelia. Here are some of the highlights (and if you were an attendee please post your feedback or follow-up questions in the comments below):

Main themes:

There was high interest in latest updates delivered in recent versions, with particular interest on the 9.2 version that just came out. (Apparently quite a few of the attendees are approaching the point in their project cycle(s) where they are free to upgrade versions.)
There was also a lot of interest in our future roadmap proposals, and how users will be able leverage and/or trade off their "magic" vs. compute resources.
dentifying, debugging, and fixing bugs faster is clearly a growing issue. Note that this includes making improvements in error messaging and results display such that it's easier to understand the behavior of the simulation.
Questions also came up about leveraging multi-core technologies for increased testbench simulation performance.

Verification CTO Yoav Hollander takes his turn driving the panel discussion

11 presenters gave bite-sized, 20 minute sessions, which helped simultaneously maintain focus and momentum throughout the event. And in retrospect, this observation might seem obvious, but having the event completely in the local language (Hebrew) helped maintain audience focus too.

The customer presentation on their conversion from e to SystemVerilog and back to e again was almost too positive -- apparently some in the audience wondered if it was a Cadence Marketing guy was giving the presentation! (It was not -- he was the real thing, telling a true story.)

As per the themes listed above, the topic of the panel discussion, "Why Does Debug Have To Be So Costly?", seemed to be well aligned with the audience's interests. The panel itself comprised 4 customers (Intel, Zoran, Marvell, and Ace Verification), and 3 Cadence R&D leaders (Yoav Hollander, Shlomi Uziel, and Ronen Shoham).

In what is becoming a ClubT tradition, the round table on our future technologies was the most popular. And unlike ClubT Europe, we were able to give live, interactive demos in this venue. [Note to Club EU attendees: Team Specman asks your forgiveness for just showing slides and not a live demo -- we'll change this next year!]

Things to improve for next time:

Evidently the momentum of the event was a little too strong, as by the end of the day people were too worn out to get the most from the round table sessions.
For future panels we need better balance the time allotted for introductory statements to give more time for the Q&A.

ClubT Hertzelia attendees: please give your feedback and suggestions for future events in the comments below!

Happy Verifying!

Team Specman

On Twitter: @teamspecman

Observations From This Autumn's Events

2009-11-18T14:00:00Z

As you may recall I was involved in producing several events this past fall. Allow me to share a few nuggets from the experience:

Specialization Is Accelerating
As industries advance, there is always a natural trend toward increasing specialization since the given technologies evolve beyond the ability of any single person to handle the wealth of growing knowledge. For example, 100 years ago a doctor could be trained in virtually all the medical knowledge that there was at the time; commonly dabbling in surgery, anesthesiology, obstetrics, etc. in the course of their practice. Today, of course, there are numerous sub-specialties within ever narrower categories of practice.

In EDA, there is finally a broad recognition that verification is a significant specialty in its own right. However, those in the vanguard of verification -- namely, Specman users -- appear to be themselves sub-dividing into distinct areas of domain expertise under the verification umbrella. Specifically, at many of the Specman-centric "ClubT" events, I was surprised to learn that this theoretically homogenous group was starting to splinter into Electronic System Level (ESL), analog mixed signal (AMS), and testbench integration-specific aspects of verification (to name just a few emerging specialties).

The User Presentation "Catch 22" Continues
Less surprising was the ongoing trend of users wanting to see more user-created presentations, yet being unwilling to contribute presentations themselves. Granted, some of this is economically driven in that a given engineer is fearful of asking their management for time and legal permission to work on a paper. However, the main negative factor here is a blanket, hyper-concern for IP leakage and/or revelation of secrets. While it's clearly good to be protective of hard-won IP, I think many companies are over-doing it to the detriment of all. They could stand to trust their people more, and/or just coach them a little. [I'll get off this soap box now & save it for a future post.]

ESL's Time Has Come
I've been in engineering long enough to have seen the first wave of ESL crest back in the late 90's. The interest in ESL was as sincere then as it is today; but this time around there was a critical difference. Long story short, it was evident that fellow veterans of the first ESL wave have a much better idea of what they are looking for from the second. If you are a specialist in RTL tools & methodologies, and this news surprises you, I strongly recommend you start following my colleagues' System Design and Verification blog stream (and read and internalize all the prior posts too).

As always, I invite you to share your observations in the comments below, or tweet them with an #EDA tag in your quip.

Joe Hupcey III

Twitter: @jhupcey

Interview With Teradyne on Metric Driven Verification

2009-11-13T14:00:00Z

Welcome to the first TeamMDV blog. We are excited to bring you information, tips, tricks and recommendations all centered around Metric Driven Verification (MDV). To start, here is an interview with Dylan Dobbyn, the verification manager at Teradyne, about their first time experience in implementing MDV. Check out Dylan's recent Chip Design article on "Metric-Driven Verification: The Key to Achieving a New Level of Productivity"

Q: First of all Dylan, thank you for taking the time to articulate to other users your experience in MDV. Let's start with an easy one, tell us a little bit about yourself and Teradyne?

A: My pleasure. Teradyne is a test equipment manufacturer based in the Boston area with 1.1B in sales for 2008. Teradyne designs and manufactures the test equipment, which is used primarily by electronics companies. I am the Verification Manager for the Semiconductor Test Division.

Q: What were the big reasons why you decided to make a change to MDV?

A: Like a lot of companies these days, we were under pressure to cut costs, and at the same time, we were coming out with a new and more complicated chip design for one of our testers. We also wanted to improve our verification environment, so that we could improve both visibility and predictability of the verification process. Measurements are the key to success, and keeping the old process with limited visibility and schedule padding was not an acceptable option. Today's project management requires a predictable process, and we knew we had to do something different than we had been doing in the past.

Q: What made you decide to choice the MDV approach?

A: Project managers were clamoring for metrics. Cadence provides metrics. The decision was easy. Additional benefits of streamlining the verification the process turned out to be an added bonus.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about how painful this was given your existing verification environment?

A: We did struggle a bit in getting started. Teradyne products have a long life cycle which translates to a lot of legacy code and environments. Additionally, large projects required 64-bit simulation environments, which was another hurdle to jump. We needed the additional the address and memory space, but had to make sure our code was still able to run properly.

Q: What was the single biggest challenge with this change?

A: Our single biggest challenge was upgrading legacy environments to run with the latest product release, which takes full advantage of the MDV features. Specifically, this using Incisive Enterprise Simulator (IES) and Incisive Enterprise Manager (IEM). The tool upgrade was actually more challenging then implementing the new MDV methodology, which actually went pretty smooth.

Q: What do you think the benefits will be in the end?

A: Predictability of course, but also efficiency. As we rely more on constrained random testing, improved methods are important to keep the simulation resources and debug times under control. We also ended up with a plan based flow, which we did not have previously. We intend on leveraging this solution to not only improve the robustness of the reusable plan, but also to reduce our total verification time even further with even more automation.

Additional information about MDV can be found at the following locations:

MDV101 Video from Demo's-On-Demand - Link
Maximizing Verification Effectiveness Using Metric-Driven Verification Whitepaper - Link
Metric Driven Verification Cadence.com Website Address - Link

Team MDV

IntelliGen Lab Now Live on Xuropa - See What You Are Missing!

2009-11-10T16:00:00Z

Team Specman guesstimates that a majority of users have migrated to "IntelliGen" -- the all new, Aspect-Oriented generation engine inside of Specman and IES-XL, and/or they are in the process of adopting IntelliGen now. However, in case your CAD configuration is just becoming unfrozen after a long project, or you just want to quickly train new users on this powerful technology, we are excited to announce there is a new lab on IntelliGen available now on the Xuropa online community. Simply go to:

http://www.xuropa.com/cadence
and click on the "Specman 'IntelliGen' Stimulus Generation Lab".

You can make a make one-off request to do the lab without signing up for the Xuropa community, or dive right in if you are already a community member. (Digression: the Xuropa community is an EDA-specific social network -- roughly similar to LinkedIn -- but with specific features to help you identify and connect with other professionals in your area of expertise (eg. verification, FPGA design, AMS, etc.)

IMPORTANT: this lab is not some cheesy Flash demo -- it's a real live, online workshop where you run and play around with the actual tool. This video by fellow blogger Joe Hupcey III from the DVCon 2009 launch of this lab platform for our VIP Portfolio elaborates on this new training medium.

Finally, as a refresher, here are some links to prior Team Specman posts on IntelliGen technology and methodology:

Introductory white paper published by the IntelliGen Team when it was first released back in December 2007

Generation Debugging With "IntelliGen" (With Video)

Generation Action: Constraints From Above

A New Generation Testcase Utility

IntelliGen Statistics Collection Utility

Performance-Aware e Coding Guidelines: Constraint Solver Tips

Constraint layering - Fine Tuning Your Environment - Part 1 and Part 2

Happy Generating!
Team Specman

P.S. This whole "online lab" experiment is an interesting one from the general perspective of "using the internet to enable people to do something that can be expensive to do effectively in-person". Of course the general idea is to give you the opportunity to get real training 24/7, on your own terms, and get the information you need without having to beg your boss for travel authorization or training budget. As such, if you try the lab -- if only in the interest of science -- please let us know if the experience "worked", and/or what can be improved to make it more valuable to you.

Ten Things I've Learned About Formal

2009-11-06T14:00:00Z

2009 is the tenth year that I've spent at least a portion of my time responsible for formal analysis products. As per my profile, my two most recent employers before Cadence were 0-In (now part of Mentor) and Synopsys. Between these jobs I consulted for eight other EDA companies, four of which offered formal products.

You would think that I've learned a few things during the past decade, and I believe that I have. Here are ten lessons I learned along the way, one for each year:

Formal should be applied early – any formal tool that requires an advanced simulation testbench as a starting point can only be run late in the project when there are few bugs left

Formal is about proofs as well as bugs – proving at least some assertions correct instills additional confidence in the design once bugs are no longer being found

Designers should be directly involved in formal analysis – many of the best assertions arise from designers capturing the assumptions in their heads

Automatic assertions can be interesting – while no tool can divine from RTL the intent in the designer's head, customers see real value in many types of automatic checks

You can't neglect the basics – R&D should not focus on exotic features at the expense of language support, robustness, and core engine performance

Assertion-based VIP should be a product, not a freebie – creating quality VIP is hard work that requires a serious resource commitment, so you should get paid for it

Coverage is a good way to link simulation and formal – customers understand coverage in simulation, so anything that formal can do to contribute metrics is a motivation for use

A good marketing story is not enough – licensing a generic formal engine from an external research lab and tacking it onto a “lint” front end does not yield a true solution

Moving users from “lint” to automatic assertions to full formal is not easy – it's better to demonstrate the value of user-specified assertions and formal right up front

It is possible to create a mainstream formal solution – Incisive Formal Verifier (IFV) is a successful product being used by logic designers as well as verification specialists

I learned the first nine things from my direct experience with customers and clients prior to arriving at Cadence three years ago. IFV was already a well established product at that point, so I realized when I joined that Cadence had also learned these important lessons even if some of its competitors had not.

Of course, IFV has continued to evolve since then, and I'm proud to have been a part of its ever-growing success. Now we've introduced Incisive Enterprise Verifier (IEV), offering novel links between simulation and formal analysis. We also have automatic assertions, high-quality assertion VIP products, coverage links, and the methodology and support for wide deployment.

The other day I sat in a Sales review at which I heard that just one Cadence customer, at just one of its sites, is actively using more than 200 IFV and IEV licenses. I could only dream of this sort of deployment in my past involvement with formal. I guess that we’ve all learned a few things in the past ten years!

Tom A.

The truth is out there...sometimes it's in a blog.

"ClubT" Herzelia Israel Verification Seminar Invitation 17 November

2009-11-06T14:00:00Z

Specmaniacs Based In Israel,

Please join us for a day of in-depth presentations and demonstrations of the latest methodologies and technologies for advanced verification this 17 November at the Dan Accadia Hotel in Herzelia.

Specman users and Cadence R&D experts will deliver presentations and demos, as per the following agenda:

08:30-09:00 Registration

09:00-09:15 Welcome and Introduction

09:15-10:30 MDV flow & solutions
--> includes updates to Enterprise Planner, Enterprise Manager, OVM e & OVM Multi-Language, IES-XL siimulation, VIP and the Compliance Management System

10:30-11:00 How to build your own Compliance Management System

11:00-11:15 << Break >>

11:15-12:00 User Presentation: "Choosing verification language and methodology: a first hand testmonial", Wilocity

Technology deep dives:

12:00-12:45 OVM e and OVM Multi-language

12:45-13:45 << Lunch >>

13:45-14:30 Panel discussion: "The Debug Challenge"

14:30-15:45 IES-XL 9.2 technology updates and Specman 9.2 Core deep dives

15:45-16:00 << Break >>

16:00-17:00 Round table discussions with R&D:
- IntelliGen + Gen Debug
- Closure automation
- Verification IP
- Enterprise Manager & Planner
- IES-XL + SimVision
- OVM e / SystemVerilog / Multi-language　

To register, please contact Etty Alon: etty at cadence dot com

Hope to see you there!

Team Specman

OVM Innovation Means Business

2009-11-03T20:01:00Z

Today, Cadence recognized it's OVM team for their innovative contribution to the Cadence enterprise starting in 2008. Why enterprise? To me, enterprise is the most exciting part because it underscore how the OVM has rallied all of Cadence verification around a common cause which has both polished our image as the verification leader and created new business opportunities.

To understand the impact, we need to step back to 2007. SystemVerilog implementations were just coming together and VMM was a mix of SystemVerilog and Vera. e and eRM, on the other hand, were well established with years of success at this point. So why OVM? To unify the ecosystem. OVM was the first open, multi-vendor, scalable methodology architected for multi-language. Looking back, this statement seemed simple enough, but the simplicity is the innovation.

Open. It doesn't get more simple than that, but it was a rallying point in the marketing and development that changed everything. The OVM started as both Apache licensed and multi-vendor and, in fact, remains the only verification methodology embodying both. With a community now 8000+ strong as measured on the OVM World website, the marketing and development simplicity certainly resonated.

Scalable. The OVM introduced to the SystemVerilog community the agent-architecture used by the e community for years. The concept itself is simple -- a consistent way to describe verification components for reuse -- but is backed by a sophisticated implementation. The innovation here is all technical -- place the burden of complexity on the methodology/library developer and provide the consumer with ease of use.

Creative: Building on past success was important, but new solutions were needed to win the hearts and minds of the nascent SystemVerilog community. The development team built an advanced factory mechanism, field automation, test classes and test selection mechanism, and more many of which have found their way into competing libraries due to that bold move to be open. As the next point will show, the team has never looked back. The creative stream is still flowing with callbacks, configuration mechanism, OVM multi-language capabilities, and much more.

Passionate. Did that one surprise you? If you have talked to anyone from the extended OVM team -- and there are hundreds of us -- that is our simple connection. I've been with Cadence for 18+ years and working with the OVM rekindled the start-up in us. We argued. We fought. We united and we delivered. And we are still doing that today. The simplicity of that emotive drive assures that you get the best out of us all the time, every time. Maybe that was latent in the team for a while, but we are certainly bringing it now. And for those on the internal team, you know we were doing that even today. :-)

I know this blog was a "pat on the back" for the OVM team, but we all need to step back from time to time and assess ourselves. We're proud of the innovation we have brought to verification and even more proud to say we ain't done yet!

=Adam Sherilog on behalf of the whole OVM team

Today's Innovation Awards and The "Trailblazer" Marathon

2009-11-03T19:00:00Z

Today myself and the whole Trailblazer team are proud to celebrate the success of my colleagues' winning awards on Cadence's "Innovation Day". In specific reference to the verification segment winners, over the past year I've had a front row seat to their struggles. They will be too modest to admit this, but let me tell you there were times when it was really dark for them.

Boston Marathon: Hearbreak Hill

But despite temptations to settle for less ambitious solutions, guided by their years of industry experience, deep technical expertise, collegial teamwork, as well as the strength derived from their hobbies (like running marathons -- no kidding, see above), they persevered to deliver on their innovative roadmap.

Fast forward to the present:

The Trailblazers are currently in mile 20 of a product development marathon to automate verification in ways no one has dared attempt before. In Boston Marathon terms, it feels like we are ascending Heartbreak Hill; so to say the least it's encouraging to have our award-winning colleagues cheer us forward as we count down the remaining miles!

Joe Hupcey III

P.S. Fellow blogger and Cadence Innovation Day award winner Adam Sherer is a real live marathon runner, who has requalified and committed to running his 8th consecutive Boston Marathon for the benefit of Children's Hospital. Beating the Patriot's Day rush by sponsoring Adam now will no doubt inspire him during his 5AM winter training sessions!

OVM Tricks and Treats

2009-10-30T20:30:00Z

Your kids may be going house to house for treats, but you can get a big OVM sugar rush from Cadence's OVM World contributions. Each delectible nugget is wrapped in documentation that helps you savor all the goodness. So reach into the bowl and indulge in these methodology sweets!

Callback Mechanism

From day 1 the OVM has employed a factory mechanism for both simple reuse and multi-language consistancy. While factories are the generally accepted practice for object oriented languages, users migrating to the OVM from other methodologies may be more comfortable with extending procedural and structural elements using callbacks. This donation adds callbacks to the OVM SV (SystemVerilog) library.

Compliance Checklist

With it's roots in eRM, users of the OVM can access to the collective experience of 5000+ tapeouts over nearly a decade using the contributed OVC (OVM Verification Component) Compliance Checklist. Since each donation is open, it is easy for the ecosystem to take them and create value-added products. Amiq has done this by automating the checklist in an OVM DVE. A demo of the OVM e version was recently blogged and one demoing the OVM SV (SystemVerilog) version will be up shortly.

Objection Mechanism

When everything works perfectly, life is just so easy. Unfortunately (or fortunately for those of us who need the work!!), it rarely works that way. The Objection Mechanism package adds a number of capabilities to help coordinate and manage complex testbenches. It includes hierarchical status coordination, objection handling, simplified end-of-test coordination, heartbeat detection of malfunctioning objects, and more.

Fourth in alphabetical order, this most downloaded contribution on the entire OVM World website with 1500+ at the time this blog was written. In its second release now, this register package contains significant improvements recommended by our customers and the OVM Advisory Group (OAG). Among these include greatly improved capacity/performance, multi-bus system-level control, alignment with IP_XACT 1.5, and much more. We do recommend upgrading from our 1.1 version and there is documentation on how to do so. The most-often asked question is "when will there be a joint package" and we are continuing to work with Mentor on that so say stuned to the OVM World and this blog!

Regression Speed-Up

OVM messages are critical to understanding both nominal and error conditions in your testbench. However, when you scale up the environment those innocent string manipulations can become very expensive regardless of the verbosity settings. This contribution show you how to optimize your messaging to improve OVM testbench performance. Like all of our contributions, this should improve your life regardless of the simulator you choose. Of course, this blogger would prefer y'all use Incisive Enterprise Simulator!!

Christmas / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa is coming next. Will there be more treats?

Yes! The genIES are hard at work conjuring up more magical treats for you so visit the OVM World contributions area and this blog frequently or sign-up for the RSS feed.

=Team genIES

Why Verification Engineers Are Like Football Players

2009-10-30T19:01:00Z

Is it their raw power? Is it the cheerleaders? Why are verification engineers like football players? It's because they know how to squeeze the maximum performance out of their resources to win the verification game. Charlie Dawson, Senior Engineering Manager at Cadence, has been leading teams that build performance into our products for years and has taken some time to put the whole game in perspective. Read more about it in his article published in EDA Design Line.

The article follows a similar thought to the paper Charlie delivered at CDNLive! San Jose last month. That paper should be post shortly with the rest of the CDNLive! content.

If you have any questions or want to follow-up on any of the points in the article, feel free to post you comment here or send them to genIES@cadence.com.

=Adam Sheriperf (just extending the "Sherilog" brand to verification performance. :-) )

4 Minute Demo: OVM e Compliance Checks Added to AMIQ's DVT

2009-10-28T15:00:00Z

Specmaniacs rejoice: long time Verification Alliance partner AMIQ has just added OVM e compliance checking to their "DVT" integrated development environment (IDE). Here is a 4 minute video demo with the highlights of this new capability:

If the fails to launch click here.

To get the full scope of the DVT tool and AMIQ as a company, recall the 5 minute general demo of the tool in an earlier post, and this interview with AMIQ's leadership. Alternatively, you can cut to the chase and email etools@amiq.ro to ask AMIQ for an evaluation license. There is additional information at www.dvteclipse.com, including the complete set of DVT manuals.

Happy coding!
Team Specman

P.S. Do you have an e language or Specman-related product, utility, plug-in, or shareware that you would like to promote? If so, please contact Team Specman offline and we’ll work with you to introduce and discuss it via this blog.

Where’s The “You” In The OVM?

2009-10-27T15:00:00Z

Cadence and Mentor have dedicated teams to the development and support of the OVM and you, our user community, have literally tens of thousands of developers dedicated to developing reusable VIP with it. But where do “you” and the OVM meet?

Sometimes the “you” is obvious – the OVM World Forum. With 1100+ unique threads and 4500+ posts, the OVM Forum is by far the most active testbench and reuse site. Every day users interact with the Cadence/Mentor development and support teams, as well as others in the OVM ecosystem, in an open community. Topics range from beginner questions, to enhancement and bug requests, to OVM contributions support, and beyond. Combined with trade-show presentations and webinars, the forums are by far the most public, open face of a testbench methodology.

Speaking of OVM contributions, this is another area on OVM World that is about “you” in a big way. If you have ideas for extensions to the OVM, contribute them! They will be given full consideration for inclusion in future releases. In the meantime, “you” can all share each other’s great ideas.

And sometimes the “you” is less obvious, but may be even more mission-critical. Because your OVM experience depends in part on the methodology/library and in part on the tool suite, some enhancements and bug requests are reported directly to the EDA vendors supporting and developing the OVM solutions. In the case of Mentor and Cadence, we use these reports to fix bugs in the OVM source code. Since these are often accompanied by customer-proprietary examples the bug reports themselves are retained by each EDA provider, but we do exchange simplified examples so that we can jointly produce OVM updates. This effort results in two benefits for OVM users – responses within contractual support timelines to assure the success of their critical projects and bug-fix updates to the OVM downloads. Cadence and Mentor produced two updates to the OVM 2.0 release using this process and a third one – OVM 2.0.3 – is coming in November.

And we can’t forget the OAG – the OVM Advisory Group. This organization of OVM users provides direct guidance for the OVM, and the member companies are publicly identified. The OVM roadmap, presented on the floor of DAC in July and available on OVM World, is a direct result of the OAG. This group will expand over time so that more of “you” can participate directly.

So where is the “you” in the OVM? It’s everywhere – in the public face of OVM World and in the private relationship users have with their EDA partners.

=Adam Sherilog

Specman/IES-XL 9.2 Is Posted - Come And Get It!

2009-10-22T20:46:00Z

We interrupt the Specman 9.2 preview series and ClubT news to announce that 9.2 is now posted on downloads.cadence.com, under the "INCISIV92" umbrella!

Hence, for those of you who couldn't get to a recent ClubT, CDNLive, or Incisive Seminar, our "9.2 preview series" is changing into the "9.2 highlights series", covering the major new features announced back at DAC.

Happy Verifying!

Team Specman

Why OVM? John Aynsley of Doulos Has 10 Reasons

2009-10-22T13:00:00Z

Believe it or not, sometimes a marketing guy just needs to say less. It's true. It does happen. Sometimes we do just get right to the point. Yeah, we do blather on sometimes but ... oops, there I go again. Just listen to John. He has 10 great reasons to adopt the OVM.

If video fails to play please click here.

Question? You can post them here or send them directly to John at john.aynsley@doulos.com.

=Adam Sheriblog

Demo: New Signal Tracing Capability in Incisive Enterprise Simulator

2009-10-21T13:00:00Z

One of the great things about working here at Cadence is having the opportunity to test and preview new features and functionality before public release. The newly released 9.2 version of Incisive Enterprise Simulator contains a new streamlined signal tracing function in SimVision.

I thought you might like to see a preview demonstrating the new capabilities for tracing signals directly within the source browser, as well as updates to the Trace Signal Sidebar.

The embedded video is best viewed full screen, which you can do by clicking the lower right-hand icon with the arrows.

If you have problems with the embedded player, click here.

Feel free to post any questions or comments!

Bob Hilker