By Doug Smith of Doulos

Conferences aren’t my favorite events to attend. They tend to be dominated by the big three EDA companies, and the messages are usually just a variation on what was said last year. However, there is always something useful to glean if you listen hard enough, and I think DVCon this year is no exception.

While DVCon is generally more of a verification conference, I found design related topics surprisingly absent. Cliff Cummings presented a good paper on using SystemVerilog’s unique, priority, and 1800-2009’s unique0 constructs, but other than that, everything centered on verification except for some brief discussion on C synthesis at a panel and the SystemC synthesizable subset at the OSCI tutorial session. Verification continues to dominate the industry’s focus as well as high-level modeling.

In fact, I felt that the major topics at DVCon this year were verification methodologies (VMM & OVM), TLM 2.0, and SystemVerilog. I’ll just say a brief word on each.

Both VMM and OVM have recently been updated. Synopsys has added significant features to VMM in their 1.2 release. Doulos sponsored a VMM 1.2 tutorial along with other VMM Central partners highlighting the new features like TLM 2.0 support, implicit phasing, and enhanced testbench structure and configuration as well as explaining how to exploit the RAL register package. In conjunction, Doulos gave away their new VMM 1.2 Golden Reference Guide and has made available a VMM 1.2 tutorial on their website. OVM is also recently updated (version 2.1), but it hasn’t majorly changed so the story is still much the same.

The SystemC NASCUG meeting was co-located with DVCon and there seemed to be a lot of interest around TLM 2.0. OSCI also hosted a TLM 2.0 tutorial session and there was a user paper session centering on TLM. VMM’s TLM 2.0 implementation generated a bit of interest as well. While I don’t use TLM for SystemC modeling, given all the buzz about it I have to conclude that it’s being well-embraced by the industry and it looks like it’s here to stay. I certainly find TLM connections quite useful in an OVM/VMM testbench.

Personally, I found the most interesting papers were those discussing SystemVerilog. Dave Rich from Mentor proposed a multiple class inheritance enhancement, which seems to have great potential. Cliff Cummings talked about enhancing the language to handle X optimism and pessimism. Eduard Cerny discussed new SV-2009 checker and assertion features. But I have to admit, the nagging question I have is, “Will this language everstop exploding?” If I may say, SystemVerilog is like an ever-expanding patchwork, where piece after piece is added but none of it ever seems to truly fit together. And every year, more and more ideas are proposed to enhance it. Oh well, I guess it’s what we have to live with. For those not converted yet to SystemVerilog, my colleague, Alan Fitch, wrote in his DVCon paper, “How to Achieve Sample-Based Coverage Using VHDL” — quite a unique topic among all the other presented papers. Keep an eye out on the Doulos website for the upload of his paper if you’re interested. I usually write papers that show how to work with or around what we already have. That’s why I presented a paper on matching asynchronous behaviors using SystemVerilog assertions (soon to be uploaded to the Doulos website), and likewise, my colleague, John Aynsley, presented a great paper on using the DPI to interface with C/C++ models.

I think the most exciting news at DVCon this year came from Accellera. Accellera’s Verification IP (VIP) technical subcommittee has announced that a universal verification methodology (UVM) is planned for release mid-March. UVM will be based on OVM 2.0.3 and have features of VMM incorporated into it. The amazing thing is that Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor are all unanimously behind UVM. I think this will definitely reshape the verification methodology story in the industry over the coming year. I was also pleased to hear that the unified coverage interoperability standard (UCIS) is due out in October. This should give us a common way to access and merge all of our coverage data. Lastly, I was rather surprised by the take-away message from Brian Bailey’s panel on minimizing verification time and effort—engineers need more training!! As a trainer, I couldn’t agree more!

Doug Smith