System Design and Verification

Running Incisive on Ubuntu Linux

2010-03-04T14:00:00Z

Ubuntu is by many accounts the most popular and the easiest to use Linux distribution for the desktop. Unfortunately for Linux enthusiasts, Cadence tends to follow the EDA Industry OS Roadmap when selecting operating systems to support. I would guess that it's a fairly common problem that users don't want to use one of the two primary Linux platforms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLES). Most of the time it's because these are not easily available. From time...(read more)

Quiet Before The Storm? And What to Expect at DVCon 2010

2010-02-22T14:00:00Z

In the last couple weeks Mentor did an about-face and decided to embrace SystemC ( I told you that would happen! ), and then Synopsys threw down the gauntlet and decided to buy two Virtual Protoyping companies. Supposedly, the word on the street is they are preparing to buy a high-level synthesis company before the year is out. Is all that cash they brag about burning a hole in their pocket? Hardly. They've come to realize, as we and Mentor did years ago, that the biggest part of EDA's future...(read more)

Moving Past The Missing Model Syndrome

2010-02-18T16:30:00Z

One of the issues that has hindered the progress of using Virtual Platforms for early software development is missing models. I recall seeing Axys Design's Maxsim tool back around 2001 and thinking how cool it was. All the user had to do was drag and drop models and wire them together to create a working Virtual Platform. At the time I was working at Axis Systems so we always called Axys "the other Axis". Axys was eventually acquired by ARM in 2004, but the block diagram editor still...(read more)

Methodology Is Important But Language Matters - Part 2

2010-02-09T17:00:00Z

In this blog, I would like to discuss the direction in the languages that will be chosen for TLM (or ESL) verification. Transaction-Level Models have been used for long time as simulation models. As we start to use more and more high-level synthesis, the link to design and implementation is becoming more important and as such, we need to develop also a mainstream verification environment that will support the new flow. Extension of existing verification methodology is required In order to help the...(read more)

What Does The History of RTL Adoption Foreshadow For The Future of TLM Methodology Adoption?

2010-02-02T14:00:00Z

Cadence is in the vanguard of a movement to a higher level of productivity via the abstraction and automation provided by Transaction Level Modeling (TLM). The industry is motivated to adopt this new methodology by its promise of achieving profitable results through project predictability and system team productivity.Without such a methodology shift projects and companies are failing at increasing rates. The question many people ask is when will they move to this new approach? Figure 1 - History...(read more)

How Big Is An int?

2010-01-29T18:30:00Z

This week I'm taking a break from my series on Android System Verification to talk about something completely different. One of the interesting things about working on Incisive Software Extensions (ISX) is the wide variety of embedded software and processors I learn about. Recently, I worked on a project with a very small Verilog CPU. As a tool provider we do our best to make all of our tools as generic as possible so they can be used regardless of the CPU type, C compiler, CPU model type, memory...(read more)

Methodology Is Important But Language Matters - Part 1

2010-01-26T14:00:00Z

Historical trends in languages Many of us have traveled around the world, and while we can often communicate with local people in our own language, we realize it is best to communicate using the local language. It helps to "break the ice" if you at least try to use some of the local language, perhaps from a guide book. The moment you do it, barriers are removed, and you are more trusted. All this considered, it is still a significant handicap to use the wrong language for the task at hand...(read more)

Android System Verification Part 6

2010-01-15T14:00:00Z

Welcome to Part 6 of Android System Verification. It's getting hard to trace back to the previous articles, so here is a complete list of links: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Last time I showed how to create hardware stimulus and use coverage to keep track of the generated stimulus across multiple runs. Recall, that we were sending commands representing hardware stimulus to the Android device and the operations could be seen on the emulated device display, but there was no way to check the...(read more)

Back to Work in 2010

2010-01-06T14:00:00Z

It's back to work in 2010. Thanks for all the great feedback in 2009. I plan to continue to bring readers interesting material about System Design and Verification in 2010. When I got back to work this week I fired up an openSUSE 10.2 VMWare image I sometimes use for development. The boot menu is normally a nice blue menu like this: This time however, I got the picture below with penguins running around the screen. I had seen the penguins infrequently in the past, but never really bothered to...(read more)

Is The Industry Ready For Mainstream Adoption of Higher Abstraction?

2010-01-04T18:00:00Z

I was recently part of an industry wide interview conducted by Clive "Max" Maxfield of TechBites . Max is trying to uncover the reality behind the apparent trend to move to the high level abstraction of transactions for design and verification. I gave the Cadence point of view that this is indeed a real trend, that major customers are moving fast to adopt a TLM design and verification solution to achieve higher productivity, quality, and more reusability of the design IP. While the EDA...(read more)

Android System Verification Part 5

2009-12-29T14:00:00Z

In the previous article I introduced the use of Specman for generating sequences of commands to send to the Android emulator. I demonstrated a better way to generate hardware stimulus compared to using the original telnet connection to the Android console. The technique was also better than trying to think of all possible combinations of commands and trying to create a script or C program to cover everything. Today, I will demonstrate how to use coverage to understand the generated sequences and...(read more)

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery - We Thank You!

2009-12-21T14:00:00Z

Let me start by sharing some recent blog activity showing competitors doing some admittedly admirable marketing work . Check it out. They write well, gather some good data, etc. All "good stuff" to help customers like you make an "informed decision". In the spirit of sharing other "good stuff" with you, let me review just a couple of 2009 highlights of our successes in the ESL domain. 2009 was the year Cadence launch significant new system-level/ESL products - C-to-Silicon...(read more)

Android System Verification Part 4

2009-12-11T16:00:00Z

Welcome to Part 4 of Android System Verification. If you are just joining make sure to read the previous three parts to get up to speed. In Part 3 I demonstrated how to use a C program to connect to the Android emulator's telnet server and how to write a simple main() function using the C API to send commands to the Android emulator to perform various hardware operations. This was much improved compared to typing commands into a telnet client. One option for verification is to make the main into...(read more)

ARM Techcon3 Virtual Classroom

2009-12-04T14:00:00Z

For those that read my September post about ARM Techcon3 in Santa Clara but couldn't make it, the Virtual Classroom is now open. All of the recorded presentations are available. You need to register, but the process was painless and I was watching presentations within a few minutes of registering. There is a filter to quickly find what you are interested in. Now I can listen to the keynote by T. J. Rodgers that I missed. I especially recommend it if you are interested in wine. Jason Andrews...(read more)

Android System Verification - Part 3

2009-12-01T14:00:00Z

In Part 2 of this series on Android System Verification I provided the basics on how to use the Android emulator console to connect to the built in telnet server and send commands to the emulator. These commands represent hardware events related to power, network, gsm, geo, and sms. In this installment I will describe how to automate this connection by using a C program to send the emulator commands. After sending commands via telnet it was clear that typing commands is not a good way to do verification...(read more)