Funny thing happened today.

After reaching out to people last week for SVUnit success stories, to my pleasant surprise I found one in my inbox this morning. It was from SVUnit early adopter Manning Aalsma of Intel (formerly of Altera). When I say early adopter, I mean early. Looking back, I found the first email he ever sent me still in my inbox requesting an early version of SVUnit. Timestamp on that was Jan 8, 2012!

I’m happy to have people like Manning using and advocating for the framework and the techniques that go with it. Here’s what he had to say about he and his teammates using SVUnit.

Thanks Manning!

-neil

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Hi Neil,

Catching up on a little reading, I came across your post from a week ago or so:

http://agilesoc.com/2018/06/11/is-svunit-a-legitimate-verification-framework/

I thought I’d share my experience so far. Continue reading →

Is SVUnit a legit verification framework?

I get that question periodically from folks who are looking into incorporating SVUnit into their verification flow. Of course it’s always phrased a little differently depending on who’s asking – How many users are there? What is the bug rate? What teams have integrated it into their verification flow? Have people published papers about it? Is it actively being developed? Do others contribute to the development? – but the intent behind the question always feels the same. We developers want to know that others have blazed the trail before us, that the tools we’re considering have a proven track record, that the major bugs and issues are long since fixed and that tools are truly ready before we get started with them.

Unfortunately, it’s a tough question to answer. Being that SVUnit is open-source and usage is basically anonymous, unless people reach out to me personally I can’t make any definitive claims.

That said, I’m confident we have enough anecdotal evidence for a solid yes. SVUnit is a legitimate test framework for design and verification engineers looking for an alternative that addresses low level code quality.

Here’s a few stats to support that yes: Continue reading →