I have a usual go-to story for my most productive experience as a verification engineer. It happened a while ago, in the middle of my 10 year consulting stint. We were a 3-person team. I was the experienced one who knew about testbench infrastructure with a younger fella who knew about the product and a woman who was more of a firmware developer. We were verifying a medium-sized, complicated’ish subsystem that – as I remember it – included a faux processor that ran some custom instruction set.

The reason I’ve always considered this a good experience is because it’s an engagement where we took advantage of three, non-overlapping skill sets. From the very beginning, I was in charge of infrastructure (I think it was VMM at the time), young fella added most of the functionality (without knowing much VMM) and our dedicated firmware expert built out processing support. In lockstep, we’d roll out incremental additions to the infrastructure, fill in functional gaps, incorporate new FW support, run a test and repeat. Continue reading →

For a seemingly straightforward technology that’s almost as old as dirt, the concept of code coverage is still kind of confusing. When you ask people what code coverage means, or better, what value it brings to FPGA/ASIC development, you’ll get answers going in a lot of different directions. Comments start at useless and run all the way up to fundamental when it comes to factoring code coverage results into sign-off decisions. And reasoning for why code coverage is both useless and fundamental comes in several shades of grey. It starts feeling like that thing we all assume we understand… but it’s rare to find someone who can explain it in a way we all agree with.

Admittedly, I expect this post to be a tad controversial so today will not be the day for consensus 🙂. Continue reading →

At first I thought this would be sad. Then I wasn’t sad. Now I am a bit sad… but happy. Also excited. After waffling for about a year, I’ve finally decided to pass the SVUnit torch. Tudor Timisescu will replace me as lead developer.

Looking back, the time I put into developing and supporting SVUnit was the best career move I’ve made. Easily. By about a mile. The friends I’ve made throughout the industry, many of the clients I worked with as a consultant and the job I have now were all made possible by working on SVUnit; the Wednesday nights I put in at the coffee shop down the hill cranking out code, examples, presentations and blog posts through a steady stream of Pantera, System of a Down and Metallica. Funny how a laptop and loud music became my peace and quiet the way it did. But it did. And it lasted about 7 and a half years; from before the v0.1 release on Nov 22, 2011 when I took the hand-off from Bryan Morris right up to mid-summer 2018. It was mid-2018 when I found myself mentally winding down from the development and support; still a user but I’d lost a bit of the motivation for helping SVUnit roll forward.

Sadness comes from walking away. But the excitement comes from the fact Tudor is moving in with a lot of the motivation I had in the early days – probably more, really. He’s been a long time user who I’ve heard from and chatted with since Dec 2, 2013. He’s got a lot of good ideas for how the framework can evolve and the gumption to make it happen, not only with SVUnit but also with SVMock.

So finally. After a year in the making, please welcome Tudor Timisescu! To everyone who’s used, supported and/or advocated for SVUnit the last 9 years, please join me in continuing to use, support and/or advocate with Tudor at the helm! Follow him on his blog VerificationGentleman.com for more.

-neil

I had a neat opportunity to do a lunch-n-learn with a large group of engineers a few weeks ago. It was organized by the IEEE Computer Society as part of a program they use to pair engineering teams with various speakers and topics. They found me through a referral from an agile software friend of mine. I pitched a topic that sounded interesting enough so it was all systems go. I flew in for a day the third week of november. We had 250 people tune in. Good realtime feedback and a great experience for me.

I’ve done webinars like this in the past but I’ve never felt like I left people with a solid feel for how they get started with agile hardware. I wanted this time to be different; I wanted to boil the mess of information that floats around in my head down to concrete possibilities; I wanted those listening to go back to their desks feeling like they had the gumption to get something started. Continue reading →

I’m looking for a list of discussion topics for a panel discussion that’ll happen at DAC in June. It’ll be a very informal/interactive session. We’ll take a list of topics and cycle through them in a series of 5-10min discussions. Audience will be encouraged to participate; agreeing or disagreeing as they see fit.

I’m looking for topics to get discussion rolling and am hoping you’ll chime in with your ideas. So if you’ve got a few minutes, I’d appreciate you joining the google group discussion and dropping a few comments or questions regarding unit testing, test driven development, SVUnit and/or related. As many as you can think of. Topics could be for or against unit testing, doesn’t matter. In fact the tougher the topic, the better! I’ll take 10-15 and and quote them in a series of slides. We’ll show the slides and invite the audience to weigh in.

 

Thanks for helping out!

-neil