Month: April 2018

Verification That Flows

Posted on by nosnhojn

Writing about portable stimulus has created some neat opportunities for me to swap ideas with others regarding how it fits into our verification paradigm. I like that. From a theoretical standpoint, I think I’ve heard enough to confirm my thought that it’s sweet spot is verifying feature sets with complex scenarios.

Trickier is to move beyond the theory toward recommendations for how it all fits together. By ‘all’ I mean more than just portable stimulus. I mean how all our verification techniques fit together in a complementary way as part of a start to finish verification flow. This is a first attempt at qualifying what ‘all’ looks like. I’ll go through each verification technique, comment on it’s purpose, how teams transition to/from it and discuss how it feeds subsequent verification activity. Continue reading →

A Verification Where And How

Posted on by nosnhojn

All verification techniques can be effective given the right scope and applied abstraction. At least that’s the argument I started in Portable Stimulus and Integrated Verification Flows with a graphic that plots the effectiveness of several techniques as a function of scope and abstraction. I have more people agreeing with the idea than disagreeing so I’ve carried on with it. I decided to dig a little deeper into exactly where and how well techniques apply. Continue reading →

Portable Stimulus And Integrated Verification Flows

Posted on by nosnhojn

While a lot of information is produced to introduce and support individual verification techniques, methods for applying a variety of verification techniques in a complementary way are harder to come by. What’s here is a push in that direction; a rough guideline covering multiple techniques with suggestions for where each is most effective and how they integrate to verify a complete SoC.

The idea of building a verification flow isn’t at all new, but the possibilities for and constraints of such flows naturally change as new ideas emerge. The event that instigated this particular article was the release of the Early Adopter Portable Stimulus Standard. Long story short: with all the excitement around portable stimulus, I haven’t seen anyone paint a clear picture of how portable stimulus (a) integrates with or (b) replaces existing verification flows. To fill that void, I’ve mapped a set of possibilities for a generalized verification flow – one that includes portable stimulus – as a reference point.

Continue reading →