I turned my car on.\u00a0 (Actually, I \u201cpushed\u201d it on as there is no place to put a key to turn anymore.)<\/p>\n
I returned to ponder if functional verification has just gotten too big for current techniques that iTBA is going from a nice to have, to a must have.<\/p>\n Several years back it was popular to brag about the compute farms & ranches one had.\u00a0 With 5,000 machines here and another 5,000 machines there it seemed a sane demonstration of one\u2019s design and verification prowess.\u00a0 But this gave way to 50,000 multicore machines and who is talking about this with pride?\u00a0 All talk is out of necessity.\u00a0 And what about the next step?\u00a0 Who has 500,000 or 5,000,000 on the drawing board or in their data centers?\u00a0 Looking around<\/strong><\/a>, it seems very few admit to more than 100,000 and even fewer have more than 500,000.<\/p>\n Verification may be in crisis, as many will say, but it you hold verification technology constant, it is not in crisis, is on a\u00a0 collision coarse with disaster.\u00a0 Addressing this crisis has been the theme of many of Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines\u2019 keynotes at DVCon<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0 His 2011 keynote<\/a><\/strong> was taken to heart by many who attended.\u00a0 The need to improve by a several orders of magnitude the \u201cVelocity of Verification\u201d has been followed by several examples over the year.<\/p>\n One example was shared several months after DVCon when Mentor Graphics and TSMC announced<\/a><\/strong> we had partnered to validate advanced functional verification technology.\u00a0 While not all test results at TSMC or our common customer, AppliedMicro, were revealed, one of the slower tests demonstrated the value of iTBA to shorten time-to-coverage by over 100x.\u00a0 Even days after that announcement we disclosed<\/a><\/strong> Mentor\u2019s Veloce emulation platform offered 400x OVM\/UVM driven verification improvement.<\/p>\n 100x\u00a0 and 400x seem like a large numbers, but it appears even bigger when you put it into the context of the time it was measured.\u00a0 With current constrained random techniques, a project that takes 6 weeks of simulator run time to reach 100% closure can reach it in about 10 hours with Questa inFact or about 2.5 hours with Veloce.\u00a0 Instead of using complex scripts to peek in on a simulation run over the course of a month and a half, a verification team could actually leave work for the day, return the next morning and have a full, complete and exhaustive verification run.\u00a0 And when even faster turnaround time is needed, emulation returns results during the work day.<\/p>\n Wally\u2019s DVCon 2011 keynote referenced 8 customer results<\/a><\/strong> coming from Mentor\u2019s Questa inFact<\/strong><\/a> tool.\u00a0 Many more have discovered what this can do for them as well.\u00a0 And with each success, come the requests from more to see what it can do for them.<\/p>\n But changing the \u201cVelocity of\u00a0 SoC Verification\u201d has not rested on one technique alone.\u00a0 Stop by the Mentor Graphics DVCon booth and we can share with you the advances we have made to address system-level verification since last year.<\/p>\n Which brings me to the point of the \u201cTornado Watch.\u201d\u00a0 As I pondered the iTBA tipping point, about \u201chow little things can make big differences\u201d as can be found in Malcolm Gladwell\u2019s book<\/a><\/strong>, my car must have been channeling Geoffrey Moore of\u00a0 \u201cCrossing The Chasm<\/a><\/strong>\u201d fame instead.\u00a0 For that reason it must have issued the Tornado Watch.\u00a0 Could it be that iTBA is set to cross the chasm from early adopters to the early majority?<\/p>\n And thankfully, I don\u2019t think my car is programmed to issue tipping point warnings, nor do I want to see if it can.<\/p>\n In the end, it will be with the benefit of hindsight that let\u2019s us know if we are crossing the chasm into the tornado or not now or soon.\u00a0 But for Mentor\u2019s part, full and advanced support of iTBA technology with Questa inFact is ready now, and we are set to cross the chasm into the tornado.\u00a0\u00a0 My colleague, Mark Olen, blogs about iTBA here<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0\u00a0 If you have not had a chance yet to read his blog on iTBA<\/a><\/strong> delivering 10x to 100x faster functional verification, it is worth the time to do so.\u00a0 You can look for him to give frequent updates on iTBA and comment on the positive impact is has on SoC design and verification teams in the months ahead.<\/p>\n I look forward to seeing you at DVCon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is my car trying to tell me something? This past Friday was the beginning of a two day internal functional…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71541,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[406,546,551,562,623,658,721,763,787,816],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-5904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crossing-the-chasam","tag-infact","tag-intelligent-testbench-automation","tag-itba","tag-ovm","tag-questa","tag-soc","tag-tipping-point","tag-uvm","tag-veloce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71541"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14626,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5904\/revisions\/14626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5904"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=5904"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=5904"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/verificationhorizons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Tornado-bp2\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/54\/2012\/02\/Tornado-bp2_thumb.jpg\")
<\/a>Moments after starting my car a winter storm alert interrupted the music on the radio and displayed two notices.\u00a0 One I am familiar with when the temperature falls and snow begins to collect on the mountain passes.\u00a0 I\u2019m not going to drive in the direction of the snow, so no problem.\u00a0 The other alert was of grave concern.\u00a0 It was a tornado watch.\u00a0 And the tornado watch was not off in some other direction many miles away, it was \u201c0 miles\u201d from me.\u00a0 I looked up, I scanned the horizon and dark black was in one direction and sun in the other.\u00a0 I changed the radio channel to a local AM evening drive station, but no mention of a tornado watch.\u00a0 I headed in the direction of the sun.\u00a0 It seemed the safest direction to head.\u00a0 But before I did, I snapped a quick picture as proof I actually read \u201cTornado Watch\u201d on the car\u2019s navigation screen.<\/p>\niTBA to the Rescue?<\/h3>\n
SoC Verification: A Balance of simulation, iTBA & emulation<\/h3>\n
Crossing The Chasm<\/h3>\n