Managing Verification Coverage Information
The UCIS Story
There is no secret as design sizes grow it is doubly burdensome for verification. Two factors that are easy to measure is the time it takes to simulate a design and the other is the size of the dataset that contains the results of the verification runs. Simulation times are growing and the datasets are getting larger. While time and attention is given to accelerated verification through emulation, or alternate verification methods, to reduce run times, less explored is the impact of larger datasets on verification closure. How does one find bugs within datasets that are so large? How can verification results from simulation, emulation, formal and more be brought together to help drive verification closure? How can one link failures in verification back to requirements?
The Accellera standards organization took a multi-year journey to help address these issues and arrived at the creation of the Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard (UCIS). You can get your free copy here if you would like to read and use it. Mentor Graphics contributed a significant starting point to the standard and collaborated with major competitors and users to add to and extend from there. But now that the standard is done, what does one do with it?
While that was a rhetorical question when the standard was done in 2012; today it begs an answer.
From my perspective there are two classes of users of UCIS. The more immediate users are those who are building verification tools that must contend with design and verification complexity now. With UCIS they have the initial underpinnings to add product features that will allow a level of data portability that was not present prior to the standard. The second class of users are those who will use the UCIS Application Programming Interface (API) to build functions that will perform simple and complex tasks on these large datasets. This last class of user that might exchange UCIS API code with each other has yet to materialize. But the stage is set for them.
To highlight what the first class of UCIS adopters have been doing, DVClub in Europe will tackle to answer this question as on what one can do with UCIS on Monday, 13 January 2014. Darron May, Product Manager at Mentor Graphics will speak for us on our application of the standard. His session is titled Blending Metrics from Multiple Verification Engines to Improve Productivity. You can find out more details about the DVClub event (speakers and presentation abstracts) and register here to attend in person or via remote access. The event will be held 12:00-14:00 GMT and is free.
