March 2015 Edition of Verification Horizons Available Online!
With a name like “Fitzpatrick,” you knew I’d be celebrating today, right?
Well, there’s no better way to celebrate this fine day than to announce that our latest edition of Verification Horizons is available online! Now that Spring is almost here, there’s a bit less snow on the ground than there was when I wrote my introduction, but everything is still covered. I’m considering spray-painting it all green in honor of the occasion, so at least it looks like I have a lawn again.
In this issue of Verification Horizons, I’d particularly like to draw your attention to “Successive Refinement: A Methodology for Incremental Specification of Power Intent,” by my friend and colleague Erich Marschner and several of our friends at ARM® Ltd. In this article, you’ll find out how the Unified Power Format (UPF) specification can be used to specify and verify your power architecture abstractly, and then add implementation information later in the process. This methodology is still relatively new in the industry, so if you’re thinking about making your next design PowerAware, you’ll want to read this article to be up on the very latest approach.
In addition to that, we’ve also got Harry Foster discussing some of the results from his latest industry study in “Does Design Size Influence First Silicon Success?” Harry is also blogging about his survey results on Verification Horizons here and here (with more to come).
Our friends at L&T Technology Services Ltd. share some of their experience in doing PowerAware design in “PowerAware RTL Verification of USB 3.0 IPs,” in which you’ll see how UPF can let you explore two different power management architectures for the same RTL.
Next, History class is in session, with Dr. Lauro Rizzatti, long-time EDA guru, giving us part 1 of a 3-part lesson in “Hardware Emulation: Three Decades of Evolution.”
Our friends at Oracle® are up next with “Evolving the Use of Formal Model Checking in SoC Design Verification,” in which they share a case study of their use of formal methods as the central piece in verifying an SoC design they recently completed with first-pass silicon success. By the way, I’d also like to take this opportunity to congratulate the author of this article, Ram Narayan, for his Best Paper award at DVCon(US) 2015. Well done, Ram!
We round out the issue with our famous “Partners’ Corner” section, which includes two articles. In “Small, Maintainable Tests,” our friends at Sondrel IC Design Services show you a few tricks on how to make use of UVM virtual sequences to raise the level of abstraction of your tests. In “Functional Coverage Development Tips: Do’s and Don’ts,” our friends at eInfochips give you a great overview of functional coverage, especially the covergroup and related features in SystemVerilog.
I’d also like to take a moment to thank all of you who came by our Verification Academy booth at DVCon to say hi. I found it incredibly humbling and gratifying to hear from so many of you who have learned new verification skills from the Verification Academy. That’s a big part of why we do what we do, and I appreciate you letting us know about it.
Now, it’s time to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day for real!
