We’re Unit Testing UVM

Posted on by nosnhojn

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 project is hosted on Github. If you’re interested in knowing more about what we’re doing, here’s a link to our UVM-UTest project charter. The entire project charter is one hand-written page so reading it won’t take long. It’ll give you a better idea of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. If you’re interested in the abbreviated version, I’m comfortable paraphrasing it as:

We’re unit testing UVM.

We have a progress page that shows you how far we’ve come so far. It shows classes and class members that we’ve unit tested. We update that a few times a day so it’s always quite current.

We’re about 3 weeks in and the project is going well. We’ve got about 250 unit tests that take about 10sec to run and we filed our first issues in the eda.org mantis database last week (you can filter out the issues filed by ‘Neil_Johnson’ to see what they are).

There’s a first planned release of UVM-UTest scheduled for June 7. That’s when you’ll be able to download the code and run the tests we have for yourself!

-neil

MiniTB: Finally… a Testbench Framework for Designers

Posted on by nosnhojn

Get the latest version of MiniTB

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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. Continue reading →

UVM Report Mock Update

Posted on by nosnhojn

Get the latest version of SVUnit from GitHub

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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… Continue reading →

Intel Agile and Lean Development Conference – Part 2

Posted on by nosnhojn

2013-04-17 18.19.43Great 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 discussion. As always happens to me during an agile conference week, I’m tired and my head hurts. That was compounded by me giving 2 talks in the same day which I’ve never done before. But I made it and now it’s time to crash. But first… Continue reading →

Intel Agile and Lean Development Conference – Part 1

Posted on by nosnhojn

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 the guy that gave me the first little push). It seems to make so much sense but you can’t figure out why others haven’t seen it already. Then slowly… very slowly… you see people pop out of the woodwork from around the world. At times you get the feeling there’s a community being built, and that you’re a part of it, but it’s still so early that it’s not entirely clear who’s in your little community or where it even exists. Sometimes you question whether it actually exists at all… but you keep plugging away because you believe in it.

Then you spend a week in Hillsboro and find out that there are hundreds of people working toward the exact same thing you are.

Surprise! The agile hardware community does in fact exist. It’s a relief to actually see it :). Continue reading →

Hardware Project Planning Survey: Full Results

Posted on by nosnhojn

After some of our own analysis, it’s time to turn the conversation over to you! Here are all the data from our 2012 hardware project planning survey.

To quickly rehash what you’re looking at, this survey was conducted by Catherine Louis and I last year. The intention was to get a feel for how successful hardware teams have been with their current approaches to project planning. As you’ll see, we had people respond from all areas of hardware development from all levels. We’ve found the results to be quite interesting.

If you want a little more background, Planning to Fail in Hardware Development is a good place to start. In there you’ll find a link to our initial analysis posted on eetimes. Other articles we’ve posted since:

But enough talk from me. Since you’re here to see data, here it is!

-neil Continue reading →

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

Posted on by nosnhojn

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. The survey is meant to show design and functional verification trends from hardware development. It’s well done and well presented by Harry.

Continue reading →