Author Archives: nosnhojn

About nosnhojn

I have been working in ASIC and FPGA development for more than 12 years at various IP and product development companies and now as a consultant with XtremeEDA Corp. My specialty for most of that time has been RTL functional verification where I have had a chance to work with some very experienced people and learn state of the art techniques. I really enjoy the challenges of being a verification engineer but as of late have come to wonder what lies beyond my verification bubble. That's lead me to agile software development and project management. There is a massive amount of material out there related to agile development. All of it is interesting and most of it should be applicable to hardware development in one form or another. So I'm here to find what agile concepts will work for hardware development and to help other developers use them successfully! You can find me at neil.johnson@agilesoc.com.

By Example: Test-driven Development of Verification IP

I’ve been putting a lot of time into developing new examples for SVUnit lately and as of wednesday last week, I’ve finished another to show how people can use SVUnit to do test-driven development of verification IP. This particular example … Continue reading

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Unit Testing UVM Components: The Making Of

Today we take another step into the practical with a demonstration of how SVUnit can be used to test UVM components. In the 3rd installment of the SVUnit Demo Series, I take people through a simple – yet complete – … Continue reading

Posted in Functional Verification | Leave a comment

Work Smarter, Not Harder

You’ve been working 12 hour days for the last 4 months. You’re coming off a night of only 4 hours sleep because all you could think about was the all-hands meeting with the CEO, CFO and CTO the next morning … Continue reading

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Is Specialization Good For Hardware Development?

Last night I started reading “The Machine That Changed The World”. It’s a book from 1990 that I’ve been meaning to read for a couple years that documents the rise of lean production through the 1900′s at companies like Toyota. … Continue reading

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TDD And A New Paradigm For Hardware Verification

We’ve looked at why teams should consider doing TDD; we’ve looked at how the roles and responsibilities change between design and verification experts; now let’s look at when everything happens. This is the key to seeing how everything fits together. … Continue reading

Posted in Functional Verification, TDD | Tagged | 15 Comments

TDD In Hardware Development: Who Does What?

Welcome back for TDD month round 2! In our first post, Test Your Own Code!, we laid out some of the motivation for using TDD with some general discussion of the mechanics and benefits. If you read Test Your Own Code!, hopefully … Continue reading

Posted in Functional Verification, TDD | Tagged | 3 Comments

Test Your Own Code! (I’ve Got Better Things To Do)

November is TDD month on AgileSoC.com. This is the first of a few installments where we look at the potential of Test Driven Development (TDD) in hardware development. If you’re unfamiliar with TDD, the first and most obvious thing you’ll … Continue reading

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Does Constrained Random Verification Really Work?

Being that we’re a week away from TDD month on AgileSoC.com, I thought that an appropriate way to get people thinking in a different direction – yes… test-driven development would take us in a different direction – would be to … Continue reading

Posted in Functional Verification | 5 Comments

Guest Blog: I Tried It (Operation Basic Sanity) And I Liked It!

We’re happy to have another guest contributer to the AgileSoC blog. This one is special because it’s a case study on an exercise I’ve written about before and presented as part of my talk at Agile2011. I’ve called it The … Continue reading

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November is TDD Month On AgileSoC.com

It’s the biggest thing we’ve done on AgileSoc.com to date. We’ve been planning it for a while. Finally it’s going to happen (in about a month from now)! November is TDD month on AgileSoC.com Starting November 1st, we’ll be taking a … Continue reading

Posted in TDD | Tagged | 1 Comment