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.

Are You Ready for the UVM-UTest Challenge?

We did our first UVM-UTest challenge on Friday. It went surprisingly well so now we’re going out on a limb by inviting others to take the challenge. The “rules” of the challenge are: A team of 3 has one hour … Continue reading

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UVM-UTest is Ready for Download

After less than a month of development, the open-source UVM-UTest project is ready for download by the masses. If you care about code quality and maintainability, you’ll be interested in what we have. For instructions on how to download and … Continue reading

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The Most Descriptive UVM Tests Ever Written

If you want to know how the uvm_printer works, in detail, I don’t think you’ll find a better explanation anywhere than my unit tests. This comes after I went through a refactoring exercise in our open-source UVM-UTest project – that’s where … Continue reading

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We’re Unit Testing UVM

A colleague and I have just started a new open-source project that we think will demonstrate the merits of unit testing in hardware. It’s quite an ambitious project called UVM-UTest. The framework-under-test, in case it’s not obvious, is UVM. The … Continue reading

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MiniTB: Finally… a Testbench Framework for Designers

Through the hardware industry’s continuing infatuation with leading verification technologies – constrained-random verification, functional coverage, numerous fancy methodologies, intelligent testbenches and a host of others – the needs of designers have been thoroughly ignored. That changes with MiniTB.

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My First SVUnit Test Challenge

Let’s have some fun, shall we? I’m looking for people to show their commitment to hardware quality by taking the My First SVUnit Test Challenge. It’s easy and perfect for anyone new to SVUnit.

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UVM Report Mock Update

I’ve had some good feedback from a couple fellows using the report mock and today I released a new version to start incorporating it. SVUnit v1.4 includes a new UVM report mock. Two significant changes…

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SVUnit v1.1 – Improved Module/RTL Support

Today, I posted a new v1.1 release of SVUnit on sourceforge. The “new” feature in version 1.1 is a refactored/simplified framework meant to increase usability, especially for people that want to do TDD or unit testing of RTL.

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Intel Agile and Lean Development Conference – Part 2

Great final day at the Intel Agile and Lean Development Conference. It started with a keynote talk by Jim Tremlett of Rally, I had morning talk and an afternoon talk and filled in the rest of the time with hallway … Continue reading

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Intel Agile and Lean Development Conference – Part 1

So pretend you’ve dedicated about 5 years to something you believe in… I mean really believe in. At the beginning it seems like you’re the only person in on it (or 1 of 2 in my case considering Bryan was … Continue reading

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