Archive for the ‘Functional Verification’ Category
Thursday, March 5th, 2015
 Every engineer and technician is aware of Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.
The law appears when your elegantly-sculpted hardware and artfully-styled software code bang up against the real world of transition delays and timing requirements.
Over time, designers and trouble-shooters develop a healthy respect for Mr. Murphy and begin to anticipate when he is looking over their shoulder, learning “best practices” for recurring design problems.
The toughest design problems to trouble-shoot are ones that fail intermittently. A hidden flaw seems to pop up randomly with no certain pattern or definable cause.
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Tags: alint pro-cdc, clock domain crossing, design rule checking, Functional Verification, linting, metastability
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Tuesday, February 24th, 2015
 Taking a cue from the open-source community, Xilinx has launched a Tcl Store that aggregates Tcl scripts contributed by the greater development community to expand the capabilities of the Vivado® Integrated Design Environment.
All Tcl scripts contributed to the Xilinx repository are free and re-distributable under an open-source license that is based on the Berkeley Source Distribution (BSD) model. Vivado users can now download apps from the Tcl Store that include practical bundles of Tcl scripts that act just like Vivado commands, including an app that can integrate Aldec Active-HDL and Riviera-PRO tools within the Vivado design flow.
To take advantage of these pre-packaged Tcl Script apps within Vivado, users can access the Tcl Store via the Vivado IDE “Tools” menu. For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog.
Tags: Active-HDL Simulator, Aldec, Aldec Active-HDL, Riviera-PRO tools, Tcl scripts, Tcl Store, Vivado design flow, Vivado Integrated Design Environment, Xilinx
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Tuesday, February 24th, 2015
This week, February 22-28, we celebrate National Engineers Week in the US to recognize the contributions to society that engineers make. During this time, there is added emphasis in schools on the importance of learning math, science, and technical skills.
I work with Generation STEAM, a group organized by the SYN Shop MakerSpace and the Henderson district library to create a series of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, [Art], and Math) classes that are free to the public. For my part, I’ve had the privilege of teaching a basic electronics class for kids a few Saturdays this year – and it’s been a blast. Our hope is that we are encouraging a few young people to follow the path of engineering.
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Tags: Aldec, Electronics Engineering, engineers week, future engineers, SoC and ASIC Prototyping, STEM
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Wednesday, January 21st, 2015
 Happy New Year!
January brought an unseasonably warm wave of weather to Las Vegas as International CES converged on the city this month.
The size and scope of this worldwide consumer electronics tradeshow continues to grow each year with new products and industries on the rise, now driven by a phenomenon called the “Internet of Things” (IoT).
Shawn Dubravac, Ph.D., Chief Economist and Director of Research for the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) kicked off the event by presenting a summary of his new book, “Digital Destiny”.
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Tags: Active-HDL, Aldec, Digital Design Verification, FPGA hardware platform, HES-DVM, International CES, internet of things, millions of ASIC gates, Multiple HES-7 FPGA development boards, Riviera-PRO, SoC and ASIC Prototyping, Xilinx Virtex-7
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Thursday, December 11th, 2014
Well folks, last call from Engineer Santa. Aldec’s #12DaysofUsefulGifts giveaway will end this Friday, December 12 at 12pm midnight Pacific Standard Time.[preview_cut]
If you haven’t registered yet, you’ll want to hurry and visit www.aldec.com/survey. There you will take a brief verification survey and be entered to win.
If you’ve been keeping up with us on Twitter and YouTube, you know that we’ve given away some fun prizes already. If you are looking for some practical and useful gift ideas for the holidays, you might want to take a closer look. I’ve already talked about some of these from Days #1-4. We’ve given away more prizes since then and sent them to engineers all over the globe! Here, take a look…
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Tags: 1 Voice Beanie with Built-in Bluetooth Headphones, Aldec #12DaysofUsefulGifts giveaway, Anker Dual-Port Solar Charger, Anker Ultra Compact External Battery Charger, Etekcity Digital Laser Infrared Thermometer, Nike Air Jordan Hood Backpack Bag, SoC and ASIC Prototyping, XBOOM Ceramic Mini Portable Capsule Speaker
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Thursday, December 4th, 2014
Happy Holidays! We’ve made it to Day 4 of Aldec’s #12DaysofUsefulGifts giveaway. If you’ve been keeping up with us on Twitter and YouTube, you know that we’ve given away some fun prizes already. But that’s just the beginning, the prizes will get larger each day until the contest ends on December 12th!
If you are looking for some practical and useful gift ideas for the holidays, take a look at some of the fun prizes we’ve already given away.
To enter Aldec’s #12DaysOfUsefulGifts drawing, visit www.aldec.com/survey. There you will take a brief verification survey and automatically be entered to win. You only need to take the survey once to be eligible for daily drawings from Dec 1st-12th. You can also earn additional chances to win by sharing the contest link and viewing the daily contest video. Follow Aldec on Twitter where we will announce each day’s winner and unveil the next day’s prize. Good luck!
Tags: air vent mount for cell phones, Aldec #12DaysofUsefulGifts giveaway, aldec winning prizes, bushnell falcon 7x35 binoculars with case, grillight led bbq spatula, magisso tea cup, miles kimball manual hand held shredder, pocketmonkey wallet multi-tool, professional cleaning set for dslr cameras, SoC and ASIC Prototyping, sugru hardware sealer
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Friday, September 19th, 2014
 This being my first summer in Las Vegas, it is the first time I’ve experienced the rainy, desert monsoon season and the powerful flash floods it can bring. Last week one of those monsoons, powered by the remnants of Hurricane Norbert, produced floodwaters so strong they completely washed out a section of the I-15 Interstate north of town. With no road for several days, those traveling to and from Utah were forced to take a long detour, winding through nearby towns and wasting precious travel time.
An effective CDC solution for design rule checking can work much the same way, like a straight, clearly marked highway that quickly delivers you directly to your destination. Without such a solution, detouring past the many CDC issues that are becoming more pervasive in FPGA design can quickly become a long, winding road – and an inefficient use of time and resources. I covered some of these CDC nightmares in a previous article, and in this post I’ll share some best practices to help avoid these roadblocks. I’ll also demonstrate how new CDC rule plugins (to be added later this year to ALINT™) can help in the mitigation of such issues.
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Tags: Aldec, alint, cdc design rule checks, cdc related failure, clock domain crossing issue, do-254, fpga device, fpga-based soc design complexity, linting, metastability issues, multiple clock domains, rmm, simulation, starc
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2014
 If you attended the Monday Night Reception at DAC 2014, you were greeted with a blast of 80s pop music. If you then said to yourself, “I’d like to meet the genius behind that idea” – that would be me. A few weeks before DAC, our marketing manager came to me with the task of being the DJ for the Monday night reception. As soon as I heard “DJ” I envisioned turntables, cool headphones, disco lights and all the fame that follows. My dreams were dashed a few moments later when she explained that I would only have a PA and a laptop.
Undaunted, I resolved to be the best DJ in the history of DAC Monday Night Networking Receptions. The first challenge was finding music everyone would enjoy. I naturally settled on 80s pop as my genre. I had the brilliant idea of picking a few songs from each year and playing it as a progressive 80s timeline during the evening. I changed my mind when I realized that bright idea would require some serious manual research and work.
Did I give up? Of course not. I did what any good engineer would do – I found an easy (and smart) solution that did not require substantial extra effort – a bit like re-using verification ip’s instead of making them from scratch. This level of engineering genius is often mistakenly perceived as laziness, but I like to call it being smart. In fact I recently wrote a blog on the topic of working smart not hard.
For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog.
Tags: Aldec, aldec 30th anniverssary, aldec 30th birthday party, dac 2014, dac chat, embedded, gopro hero3+ camera, Hardware Emulation, safety-critical, SoC and ASIC Prototyping, training, uvm, uvm methodologies, verification, vhdl verification using osvvm
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Thursday, May 15th, 2014
Alex Grove, FirstEDA Applications Specialist, was kind enough to author a guest blog for Aldec. Here’s an excerpt:
Here in Europe, I recently had the opportunity to work with Jim Lewis, OS-VVM Chief Architect and IEEE 1076 Working Group Chair, on the first Advanced VHDL Testbenches & Verification training course. This training, held in Bracknell, UK, was attended by engineers from several major European system companies who design and verify programmable devices (FPGAs). VHDL is by far the dominate language used by Europe’s system companies for the design and verification of FPGAs, however it is unclear to many how to enhance their verification with VHDL. What I have found is that experienced FPGA design engineers (including myself) are not utilising the VHDL language for verification.
Jim Lewis introduces VHDL’s verification capabilities, including new VHDL 2008 features and the Open Source VHDL Verification Methodology (OSVVM). OSVVM provides a methodology for testbench development and verification packages that provide functional coverage and random value generation. (more…)
Tags: advanced vhdl testbenches, Aldec, bist, built-in self test, coverage, design, design and verify programmable devices, finite-state machine, FPGA, fpga design engineers, fsm, functional coverage, ieee 1076 working group chair, ieee 1149.1 tap, open source vhdl verification methodology, os-vvm chief architect, osvvm, random value generation, randomization, test access port controller, test mode select signal, testbench development, tms signal, verification, verification packages, verification training course, verification with vhdl, VHDL, vhdl 2008 features, vhdl osvvm CoveragePkg to a fsm
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Thursday, March 13th, 2014
 In James Bond movies, Agent 007 has some awesome gadgets but never listens to Q’s instruction on how to use them properly. I’ve often wondered what it would be like if Bond actually did learn about the various features of his tools and how to use them most efficiently.
Sure, that would probably eliminate all of the plot twists that make for a great movie, but when it comes to real life – I don’t care for plot twists. What about you? If you were a secret agent given these tools to keep you out of trouble or even save your life – would you take the time to learn about all of the features?
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Tags: advanced verification platform, Aldec, hdl code, image plots, plot feature, plot windows, polar, qam constellations, resources, Riviera-PRO, simulation, time-domain based results analysis, traditional waveforms, using plots for hdl debugging, vector, verification
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Every engineer and technician is aware of Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.
