I think it’s been about 9 months since Mentor Graphics announced UVM Express. While I hope people are seeing value in the idea of UVM Express, I haven’t heard much about it since it was announced which makes me wonder if it’s hit it’s mark. Continue reading
UVM Express
UVM Express Step 2: SVUnit with Covergroups and UVM Agents
I can honestly say that as of a couple weeks ago, I’ve gone further with SVUnit than I thought was realistic when I first starting looking at it. Having done more TDD, written more tests and recently finished step 2 of my UVM Express example, I’ve come to the conclusion there’s value in unit testing anything! That includes coverage groups and UVM agents… which I talk about here.
Why I Like UVM Express
This week Mentor released an extension to UVM called UVM Express. Normally, when someone announces an extension to the UVM, it involves more code or more tools. Not so in this case. With the library passing 67,000 lines of code (can that be right??), Mentor isn’t just piling on more code. UVM Express is an “extension” that helps people use what’s already there.
Here’s a few excerpts from the UVM Express page on Mentor’s verification academy with some additional commentary:
The UVM Express is a collection of techniques, coding styles and UVM usages that are designed to increase the productivity of functional verification. The techniques include raising the abstraction level of tests, writing tests using BFM function and task calls, adding functional coverage, and adding constrained-random stimulus generation.
Seasoned (aka: skeptical) verification engineers that have seen their share of new product announcements promising “increased productivity in functional verification” and suggesting “raising the level of abstraction” might be tapping the back button by this point but I’d encourage those skeptics to read on. I think the “revelations” appear in the next few sentences. Continue reading
By Example: Test-driven Development of Verification IP
I’ve been putting a lot of time into developing new examples for SVUnit lately and as of wednesday last week, I’ve finished another to show how people can use SVUnit to do test-driven development of verification IP.
This particular example involves development of an APB master BFM. APB isn’t the most complicated of bus protocols but it’s a very good subject for an example like this because the code and tests are easy to understand (there’s an APB example in the latest UVM release also, presumably for the same reason).
UPDATE: for people looking at UVM Express that was announced by Mentor Graphics on Feb 22, this is my interpretation of how TDD can be applied at the lowest layer development of the BFM. Examples showing the addition of functional coverage and completion of an agent that includes sequence generation are still to come. You can see UVM Express on the Mentor website by going here.