Knowing What Not to Know

My kids play a game where they pick out people and argue about what their superpower is. If we’re all indeed born with a superpower, I’d have to say mine is ignorance. Admittedly – and, yes, unfortunately – this is a superpower that couldn’t be more lame. But accepting the hand I was dealt, I feel like I’ve turned ignorance into an advantage. Continue reading

My RTL is Done

Kind of.

I regularly hear that part of why designers don’t have time for unit testing RTL is because they’re under extreme pressure to deliver RTL to PD. I have very little experience in this direction but I think it’s so PD can get on with floorplanning and <whatever it is they do>. The thing about the early RTL drops is that they almost always happen before any meaningful verification is done. They tend to be very buggy, sometimes borderline non-functional, but they must be useful otherwise the pressure wouldn’t exist.

While I don’t totally understand the reasoning, I do understand the pressure. When a design engineer says there’s no time for unit testing, I shrug my shoulders and sympathize as best I can.

Then I get thinking… what if there’s a way we could relieve the pressure by giving designers a way to deliver buggy, non-functional RTL faster than ever to PD? With the added breathing room, they could add a few unit tests as they code.

This is where Poser comes in. Continue reading

Agile Hardware is More Than Verification

Choosing a domain name for a blog can be tricky, no? You want to pick something that describes what you’re doing, but also something catchy that people will relate to and remember. In the days before AgileSoC.com, I remember choosing between 2 domain names. It was a short discussion via email between Bryan and I and the decision came down to agileverification.com or something more inclusive… Continue reading

Agile2015 (Hardware) Conference Countdown

Looked at the calendar today and discovered the Agile conference Washington, DC is less that 3 weeks away. Me and my hardware demo are on the schedule again this year, so that means less than 3 weeks until the new and improved version makes it’s debut. I’m looking forward to it.

Here’s a description of my talk from the agile2015.agilealliance.org scheduled for Thursday Aug 6th at 2pm…

Screen Shot 2015-07-15 at 9.31.45 PM

At a glance, this year’s talk looks similar to last year. TDD is still the theme from the embedded software right down to the hardware. We’ll do a demo in the last 15 minutes again. We’ll see dots dancing on the screen. All cool stuff. The big upgrade, however, is that this year is all about the hardware. With a more realistic circuit, much more logic and upwards of 100 hardware tests, there’s way more to look at and real lesson’s learned.

I’m proud to say we’ve gone from about a 1 to a solid 7 on the hardware.

Way better.

For any hardware developers going to the conference or even in the area, I’m always happy to chat (at length!) about agile hardware. And for all my software friends, I’m looking forward to our yearly visit!

See you in about 17 days!

-neil

Agile @ DAC – The Aftermath

Pleasantly surprised that I’m able to call DAC a big success for agile hardware.

Agile Evolution in the Verification Academy Booth

IMG_3237It started monday evening with the Agile Evolution panel in the Mentor Verification Academy booth. We were shooting for a half-hour open discussion where we went through some of the concerns people have with agile development (thanks to my work colleagues for helping come up with a list to get us started). Now that it’s over – and worked great – I can admit that I was a little nervous about the format. I knew the key would be people jumping in with their opinions because without that it would have been a boring half hour of one way conversation. Fair to say we did it though thanks to a great job from Dennis Brophy as moderator, Harry Foster as expert and me playing the role of ‘that other guy’. Continue reading