Summer Issue of Verification Horizons Update
For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, the Summer issue of our Verification Horizons newsletter is available here. As always, the issue is packed with many useful and informative articles to help you improve your verification, but I wanted to point out two articles in particular.
The first article, “Don’t Forget the Protocol! A CDC Protocol Methodology to Avoid Bugs in Silicon,” was written by several of my Mentor colleagues from our Formal Verification team and shows you a complete clock-domain crossing methodology that overcomes the challenges you may encounter in verifying designs with multiple clock-domains. Existing methodologies tend to suffer from a lack of interoperability between CDC, Formal and Simulation, making it cumbersome and time-consuming to establish a relation between the results for analyzing coverage and reviewing CDC paths. The new methodology automates the setup from CDC to Formal and Simulation to ensure easy and correct propagation of setup and correlation information across tools for faster design closure.
The second article I wanted to bring to your attention is from our friends at Agnisys who share some valuable insights into “Auto-Generating Implementation-Level Sequences for PSS.” If you’ve been following our recent Portable Stimulus articles, you’re familiar with the new PSS standard that lets you create an abstract activity graph to define the scheduling relationships between critical actions that you want to execute. The implementations of those actions are provided using what PSS calls exec blocks, which use either code templates or imported method calls in the target language. Agnisys has developed a tool that will let you define complex low-level sequences of register- and pin-manipulation operations and auto-generate correct-by-construction exec block definitions for a variety of target languages that you can use in your PSS model.
Lastly, I’d just like to point out that it is entirely coincidental that James Holzhauer, the now-former Jeopardy! champion about whom I wrote in the issue’s introduction, ended his 32-game winning streak on the very day that Verification Horizons was released at DAC.
