Thought Leadership

Free at Last! UVM1.0 is Here!

By Tom Fitzpatrick

By now you’ve probably heard that Accellera approved the Universal Verification Methodology Standard (UVM1.0) today. This announcement is the culmination of a great deal of work by the members of the Accellera Verification IP Technical Subcommittee (VIP_TSC), ably led by Tom Alsop of Intel and Hillel Miller of Freescale, and all who contributed to this outstanding effort should take a moment to bask in the glow of the accolades now flying around the blogosphere and twitterverse. To my colleagues on the VIP-TSC, I offer a hearty “Yo!” (sorry – inside joke) echoing those sentiments.

As a veteran of standards committees gong back to Verilog-95 (has it really been that long?), through Verilog 1364, SystemVerilog and now UVM, I’d like to offer my perspective. I have long been a proponent of Karen Bartleson’s First Rule of Standards, “Cooperate on standards; Compete on tools,” even before she had the brilliant idea of writing a book about it (which I strongly recommend, by the way). Having spent more time over the years than I care to recall trying to engage customers with new technology only to see them stuck where they are because of a mountain of proprietary code, I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to a level playing field. I expect that the user community is as well.

The value of standards has always been that a user can wrte one piece of code and use it across multiple tools to see which one is best. This is why Mentor has always been a strong supporter of standards, whether de facto, like OVM, or “official” standards from Accellera or IEEE. With UVM opening a new era of cooperation in the standards realm for functional verification, we invite our friends to join us in some healthy competition.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/verificationhorizons/2011/02/18/free-at-last-uvm10-is-here/