TDD

Stepping Through an RTL Unit Test

Posted on by nosnhojn

Pretty much every testbench I’ve ever built, used or seen has a free-running clock that’s driven within a while or forever loop. Not much can happen without the clock in a synchronous design so defining the clock logic is usually the first and most obvious thing we do as verification engineers.

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Assuming your design-under-test is synchronous to the positive edge (they almost always are), testbench components usually do their work somewhere off the posedge to avoid races. With even a simple testbench these days, there will be several components, each with their own thread, pushing or pulling data from various interfaces on the DUT. The free-running clock is that steady bass drum beat that holds everything together. Continue reading →

TDD for Design Proof-of-Concept

Posted on by nosnhojn

It’s finally time to see if TDD is a viable technique for writing RTL with verilog. But first, a little backstory…

For the Agile2014 conference in Orlando this past summer, Soheil and I built an Agile hardware/software co-development demo using a Xilinx FPGA with an ARM dual core Cortex-A9 to show how TDD could be used to write embedded software, drivers and RTL (i.e. TDD of a complete system). Continue reading →

TDD Applied To Testbench Development

Posted on by nosnhojn

When we were writing about TDD back in November 2011 during our TDD month, admittedly I had very little experience with it. The goal with TDD month was to spread the word and drum up a little interest in a technique the the software folks have been using successfully for years. I’d used it on a small scale but lacked the experience to back up a lot of what I was writing.

Over the last few months though, that’s changed. I’ve spent a good amount of time collecting feedback from and supporting SVUnit early adopters. That’s been good for getting a feel for how others in hardware development see TDD. Just as important, I’ve been using TDD myself to build testbenches and it’s been going well… very, very well. I’m at the point where I’m going through a pretty repeatable cycle that I think could be useful for others contemplating TDD. I’ve talked about this cycle before, but it’s worth revisiting now that I’ve been through it. Continue reading →

(Wasted) Effort Spent In Verification

Posted on by nosnhojn

I just spent a few minutes reading Harry Foster’s analysis of a functional verification study commissioned by Mentor Graphics and carried out by Wilson Research Group in 2010. There’s lots of good information in Harry’s analysis – there’s 9 posts in all – and I’d highly recommend people take a look if they haven’t already. It’ll be worth your time. The posts go back to June 26th, 2011… which, admittedly, makes me a little slow on the uptake :). Continue reading →

Test Driven Development: Introducing the SVUnit Framework

Posted on by Bryan Morris

Up until now, we’d been discussing the justification of using TDD in an ASIC development flow.   Hopefully, we’ve convinced you to try it.  In this post we’ll introduce a TDD framework that has been developed for SystemVerilog to help you use this design technique.

A couple of weeks ago, just after we got started with TDD month, Neil added the link to the posts on several industry forums, and got this comment from Alex Gnusin on the verification guild:

“Is it a Designer responsibility to test each line of code? In this case, there is a need to provide designers with working methodology to verify their code…”

To which Neil responded:

Alex: I’m not sure if you guessed we’d be covering the topic of a working methodology – aka: unit test framework – but if you did, I’d like to thank you for that nice bit of foreshadowing!

Alex is right, a proper framework is pretty important for anyone doing TDD; primarily because it gives you the opportunity to get up and running quickly.

In the software world, there are are number of wildly popular unit test frameworks. JUnit might be the best known (for those doing java development) but there are about a million others (as you can see with a quick trip over to Wikipedia). A unit test framework is critical for TDD, that’s why myself and Rob Saxe (both formerly of XtremeEDA) put one together a couple of years ago for people wanting to do TDD with SystemVerilog.

First presented at SNUG San Jose in 2009, SVUnit is a unit test framework that provides:

  • structures for creating and running unit tests
  • utilities for reporting test status and results
  • a test “runner” that executes a set of test suites and report on their overall success/failure
  • scripts to automate the mechanical aspects of creating new unit test code