We’ve hit a notable day in SVUnit history today with an hour training course going live on Mentor’s Verification Academy.

An Introduction to Unit Testing with SVUnit is a 5 part video course. It starts with my opinions on how advanced verification methods have failed to reach their potential, goes on to introduce SVUnit with a couple of coding examples and finishes with data from case studies that show the value of unit testing with SVUnit.

While the course is meant to flow naturally beginning to end, each of the 5 parts stands well on its own. Depending on what you’re after, here’s a little guidance on what sessions and details are best for you… Continue reading →

 

Version 3.8 of SVUnit, just released, improves support and usability for people unit testing UVM components.

Download the Latest Version of SVUnit from GitHubBut before we talk about new features, I want to mention that the cool part of this release… for me anyway… is that I didn’t have to do anything! Colleen Piercey and Dave Read, colleagues of mine from XtremeEDA, are responsible for adding and testing the version 3.8 features. That makes Colleen and Dave the newest active contributors to SVUnit!

As far as new 3.8 features, people can now use create_unit_test.pl to generate a UVM specific test case template. The template gives test writers placeholders for connectivity in an auto-generated UUT wrapper. It also inserts file includes, package imports and required function calls in the setup and teardown to avoid people having to do it themselves. Importantly, the new UVM test case template compiles and runs with UVM as-generated so you start writing tests from a known good state. Continue reading →

The inaugural SVUnit User Group Lunch will take place the week of DVCon in San Jose. Bringing SVUnit users together is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. So much so that I’ve held off using the word ‘inaugural’ for my entire life, saving it for exactly this moment!

Details are still being worked out, but so far it’s looking like lunch time, Wednesday March 2, somewhere near the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose. It’ll be an informal gathering where developers that are either using, evaluating or thinking of using SVUnit can get together, get to know each other and share experience and opinions. We’ll have room for about a dozen people (happy to say I’ve got 3 confirmed already).

This is an important community building exercise that I’m pretty excited about. With the SVUnit user base growing, now seems like the right time to start learning from each other. If you’re an SVUnit user and/or you want to meet other SVUnit users over lunch, please let me know at: neil.johnson@agilesoc.com. I’ll follow-up with details as they get sorted out.

-neil