Archive for the ‘Functional Verification’ Category
Wednesday, February 10th, 2016
 One of the reasons I like using UVM is its tendency toward an organized structure and uniformity. Some may find it annoying to adhere to such a strict format in UVM, but I think it’s a good way to keep the basics of UVM engrained in your brain. You always want a good foundation and development of strong fundamentals in any endeavor. Verification is no different and UVM hammers the fundamentals home.
UVM has a great structure and organization paradigm. I consider there to be two distinct and fundamental elements in the UVM structure: Components and Objects. Now this characterization isn’t strictly correct because uvm_components are extended from uvm_objects, but I think they are used in such a way that warrants the distinction. I consider it similar to the idea of trucks and cars. In my view, trucks are also cars, but it’s useful to note the difference.
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Tags: debugging, resources, systemverilog, training, uvm, verification
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Friday, January 22nd, 2016
 I like FPGAs. My first experience with an FPGA was my university final year project where I demonstrated BIST with four Xilinx© 3000 devices; this was before FPGAs had JTAG built in. Filling up these devices with ViewDraw schematics required many hours in front of a terminal. Fast track to today’s advances such as Xilinx UltraScale and Vivado HLx, and I hope you would agree things have moved on quite a bit.
Amid all this changes, however, there are some things that have remained constant. Those are the three things that are great about FPGAs: they are reprogrammable, reprogrammable, and, they are reprogrammable!
So how is this capability utilized? Here are three examples:
Electronic products using FPGAs:
I think it is important not look at FPGAs as some poor cousin of an ASIC. This view is from the days of LSI Logic and Xilinx marketing battles, when FPGAs were used for mopping up “glue logic”. Today an FPGA provides a massively parallel programmable digital platform with a lot of silicon IP, such as high-performance interfaces. This capability is widely used by many industries now; it is not solely driven by the volume of parts. Today, you even find FPGAs in consumer products.
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Tags: acceleration, asic, embedded, FPGA, hardware, project management, university, verification, Xilinx
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Tuesday, December 15th, 2015
FPGA designers using VHDL have three choices: Stick with VHDL, switch to SystemVerilog, or.. use the best of both. This guest blog from Doug Perry, Senior Member Technical Staff at Doulos, outlines the pros and cons of each.
The latest crop of FPGA devices are enormous when compared to ASICs that were built not that long ago. Verifying these ASICs required detailed plans, multiple tools, and sometimes special languages. Verification was key because the cost of a respin was prohibitive. FPGA designers using VHDL have three choices: Stick with VHDL, switch to SystemVerilog, or.. use the best of both. This guest blog from Doug Perry, Senior Member Technical Staff at Doulos, outlines the pros and cons of each.
The same is not necessarily true of FPGAs because they can simply be re-programmed when an error is found. However the cost of finding the error in the lab can still be very expensive. This is related to the fact that the number of LUTs available in the device has skyrocketed, but the number of IO pins has not. Therefore getting visibility into the inner workings of the device from outside becomes much more difficult. Finding the source of an error therefore also becomes increasingly difficult. To counteract this problem, designers need to find errors before the device gets into the lab. To do this they need to adopt ASIC-like verification methodologies.
Tags: doug perry, doulos, FPGA, resources, systemverilog, uvm, verification, VHDL, Webinar
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Friday, December 4th, 2015
 Verification can be a challenging endeavor. As designs grow in size and complexity, engineers are having difficulty confirming their designs behave properly. This is where UVM may provide some relief. UVM aims to deliver an easier and more flexible way of creating robust test environments so that you can verify those difficult designs effortlessly.
So what is UVM?
UVM stands for universal verification methodology and is based on an earlier verification methodology (OVM 2.1.1 developed by Cadence and Mentor Graphics). Accellera used this OVM base, continued development, and now maintains it as a more modern and updated version in UVM. Tangibly, UVM is a library of SystemVerilog code that is intended to help engineers write effective test and verification environments. You can download the UVM class library code, user guide, and reference documents from Accellera’s website.
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Tags: Aldec, Riviera-PRO, uvm, verification
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Wednesday, November 4th, 2015
Next week, Aldec will join other top tier organizations as a proud Silver Sponsor at DVCon Europe 2015 in Munich, Germany. There our team will offer live demonstrations of hardware-assisted verification of UVM following Doulos Ltd.’s Easier UVM guidelines. Alex Grove of Aldec will also deliver a DVCon Europe tutorial, ‘UVM Hardware Assisted Acceleration with FPGA Co-emulation’.
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Tags: FPGA Co-emulation, Hardware-Assisted Verification, uvm, UVM Hardware Assisted Acceleration
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Tuesday, October 27th, 2015
 Just in time for Halloween, Aldec has released a popular past webinar Don’t be Afraid of UVM for Hardware Designers on YouTube.
Designers are usually very busy doing their work and have little time left for experimentation with new methodologies. Unfortunately for them, official documentation of UVM (Universal Verification Methodology) was written by Verification Engineers for Verification Engineers, concentrating on high-level features and completely neglecting lower-level details such as connecting UVM testbench to your design.
Our webinar starts with solid review of SystemVerilog interfaces with special attention paid to Virtual Interfaces. Then it proceeds to Sequences and other Data Items, processed by Sequencers and fed to the design under test via Drivers. The role of Monitors and Scoreboards in analysis of results is explained. The presentation concludes with environment configuration and running test from the top-level module.
For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog.
Tags: design, hardware, resources, systemverilog, uvm, verification, Webinar, YouTube
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Friday, May 15th, 2015
 Well, the short answer to that is, “Awesome”. Perhaps, as the product manager of a simulation tool, I’m a little biased. Not to discount the challenges that FPGA design teams face on daily basis, particularly with device complexities now going through the roof.
There was a time, not so long ago, when using a single FPGA device from one vendor was not so uncommon and simulation and verification were quite interchangeable terms. However in recent years, with the development of more complex FPGAs and an even more complex design process involving the use of IPs, VIPs and third party models , the need for vendor agnostic tools for simulation and verification has become more evident.
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Tags: Altera, FPGA, Lattice, microsemi, modelsim, simulation, simulator, verification, Xilinx
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Monday, April 20th, 2015
How to use VIPs In Practice
Let’s assume that we are designing a new system on chip (SoC) which contains a processor and memory controller, as well as analog and digital peripherals like Ethernet, USB, 1-Wire and JTAG controllers.
Allow me to describe a typical verification process, and explain why I recommend the use of Verification IPs within the testing process.
Figure 1. Typical verification process
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Tags: Aldec, Emulation, HES-7, HES-DVM, ICE, In-circuit emulation, Kamil Rymarz, Monitor, Riviera-PRO, SoC Verification, Speed Adapter, Test, Transactor, Validation, Verification IP
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One of the reasons I like using UVM is its tendency toward an organized structure and uniformity. Some may find it annoying to adhere to such a strict format in UVM, but I think it’s a good way to keep the basics of UVM engrained in your brain. You always want a good foundation and development of strong fundamentals in any endeavor. Verification is no different and UVM hammers the fundamentals home.
