Thought Leadership

A Decade of SystemVerilog: Unifying Design and Verification?

September 19, 2013 • 2 MIN READ
By Dave Rich

It’s hard for me to believe that SystemVerilog 3.1 was released just over 10 years ago. The 3.1 version added Object-Oriented Programming features for testbench development to a language predominately used for RTL design synthesis. Making debug easier was one of the driving forces in unifying testbench and design features into a single language. The semantics for evaluating expressions and executing statements would be the same in the testbench and design. Setting breakpoints and stepping through the code would be seamless. That should have made it easier for either a verification or a design engineer to understand a complete verification environment. Or maybe it would enable either one to at least understand enough of the environment to isolate a particular problem.

Ten years later, I have yet to see that promise fulfilled. Most design engineers still debug their simulations the same way they debug in the lab: they look at waveforms. During simulation, they rarely look at the design source code, and certainly never look at the testbench code (unless it’s just basic pin wiggling like a waveform). Verification engineers are not much different. They rely on waveform debugging because that is what they were brought up on, and many do not even realize source-level debugging is available to them. However the test/testbench is more like a piece of software than a hardware description, and there are many things about a modern testbench that is difficult to display in a waveform (e.g. call stacks, local variables, and random constraints). And methodologies like the UVM add many layers of source-level complexity that most users do not have the time to wade through.

Next week I will be presenting as part of an Industry Special Session during the Forum on specification & Design Languages (FDL September 24-26,2013) that will discuss these issues and try to get more involvement from the academic and user communities to help resolve them. Was combining constructs from many languages into one a success? Can tools provide representations of source-level constructs in an easier graphical form? We hopefully will not need another decade.

Dave Rich

Dave Rich is Verification Technologist at Mentor Graphics and is one of the authors of Mentor’s Advanced Verification Methodology cookbook. He began his career as a design and verification engineer in 1981 at Data General. In 1987, he joined Gateway Design Automation as one of the first application engineers to support Verilog-XL. At Gateway, he helped design many of the early features of the Verilog Hardware Description Language (HDL), and after Cadence acquired Gateway, helped prepare the Language Reference Manual (LRM) that would eventually be donated to the newly formed Open Verilog International. In 1995, he joined another Verilog simulation company, Frontline Design Automation as an AE manager and later as a Product Manager after it was acquired by Avant!. In 1998, he joined Ambit Design and worked as a consulting engineer for both synthesis and simulation products after it was acquired by Cadence. In 2000, he joined Co-Design Automation as Director of Application Engineering where the Superlog HDL was being developed that eventually became the basis of the Accellera SystemVerilog 3.0 standard. Co-Design Automation was acquired by Synopsys in 2002. Dave began work on numerous technical committees within Accellera and later the IEEE P1800 working group, which he continues today.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/verificationhorizons/2013/09/19/a-decade-of-systemverilog-unifying-design-and-verification/