Thought Leadership

OVM Gets Connected

By Dennis Brophy

OVM Bridges SystemVerilog and SystemC Languages

When UVM Connect was first released, the multilingual connection between IEEE Std. 1800™ (SystemVerilog) and IEEE Std. 1666™ (SystemC) standards bridged the two languages to allow design and verification engineers to access UVM from SystemC or SystemVerilog to exploit native languages advantages.  OVM users wondered if it was possible to support them as well since OVM is a derived from UVM.

It is possible and UVM Connect has been extended to allow OVM users to enjoy the same benefits.  An update to UVM Connect now allows it to be compiled to run with the OVM.  And since the extensions are based on IEEE standards, they can be used in your simulator of choice.

OVM Thrives

The thriving OVM community is of no surprise.  Last year, Harry Foster blogged about research on the use and adoption of verification methodologies.  The research was done after UVM was established as an Accellera standard, and showed OVM continued its leading position as shown in one of the charts from Harry’s blog (see below).  The chart even showed OVM was predicted to have a modest growth in adoption as well.

Mentor continues to bring many of the UVM additions back to the OVM user community in a way that does not disturb the upgrade path from OVM to UVM.  The major addition to UVM in the first round of Accellera standardization was the addition of a register and memory package.  This was back ported to OVM.  (The OVM register and memory kit can be found here, if you are interested.)  Now, UVM Connect has been extended to provide full OVM use.

Download

The UVM Connect 2.2 kit supports multilingual use of OVM and can be found at the Verification Academy and the Accellera UVM World contributions download site.

If you find issues or have other suggestions that we should consider, you can always share your input at the OVM Forum or UVM Forum.  In addition to interacting with other users, the Verification Academy is a good site for online resources like the UVM/OVM Cookbook, basic and advanced OVM/UVM training, and more.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/verificationhorizons/2012/09/10/ovm-gets-connected/