Category Archives: Functional Verification

How Do Verification Engineers Waste 2 Hours, 52 Minutes, 48 Seconds a Day?

If you need a good way to waste 36% or your day, debugging code is your best bet! That’s what I figured Thursday while listening to Harry Foster’s analysis of the 2012 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Survey commissioned by Mentor Graphics. … Continue reading

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Your Coverage Model is Wrong!

Here’s the scene: you’re a hardware engineer at a conference sitting in on a talk about functional coverage. You’re there because you think functional coverage is important. You think you do a good job of building functional coverage groups but … Continue reading

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How Do You Feel About The UVM?

I’ve had a lot of reading and commenting on my last post Time to Blow Up UVM. Now I’m looking for an anonymous show of hands to see if I’m on the mark or completely out to lunch regarding UVM. -neil

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Time to Blow Up UVM

Just as it seems the verification community has converged on a methodology – a universal methodology as it were – that finally meets the needs of EDA vendors, IP providers and users, along comes somebody to suggest we should blow … Continue reading

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Local UVM Components Aren’t Local

Here’s a tips-n-tricks tidbit for the functional verification engineers in the crowd that are using UVM. You may have found yourself in this situation before, you’re using IP developed by somebody else and that person has deemed a certain UVM … Continue reading

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UVM Express: So Close Yet…

I think it’s been about 9 months since Mentor Graphics announced UVM Express. While I hope people are seeing value in the idea of UVM Express, I haven’t heard much about it since it was announced which makes me wonder … Continue reading

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I’m Not Anti-Constrained Random…

I’m anti-constrained random. I would never use constrained random. I think it’s an overhyped technique that doesn’t produce the results we think it does. People would be better off forgetting about it and going back to directed testing. Ok… a … Continue reading

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You’re Either With Me Or You’re With: The UVM Sequencer

Time for a new series of posts on agilesoc.com. I think it’ll be best to call this a series of challenges to the functional verification community at large. I’ll point out techniques that have irked me, wonder aloud why we … Continue reading

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Quality Lag and Debug Lag with Constrained Random Verification

If you’ve read Does Constrained Random Verification Really Work and Functional Verification Doesn’t Have to be a Sideshow, you’ll know that I’ve become a bit of a skeptic when it comes to constrained random. My opinion hasn’t changed much since those … Continue reading

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Common Verification Tactics No One Should Ever Use

How many people in the world are named Glenn? An odd question for sure, but what if that were your job, to verify the number of people named Glenn in the entire world? How would you do it?

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