Month: August 2018

A Love/Loveless Relationship With Documentation

Posted on by nosnhojn

Try announcing documentation isn’t important in semiconductor development. You’ll be outed as a heretic! Ask people to write it and you’ll hear a sigh. Ask for an example of decent, truly useful documentation and people struggle to find it. To put it mildly, in semiconductor development we’ve got a love/loveless relationship with documentation. We all agree it’s critical but we don’t like writing it. That and we kind of suck at it anyway.

But we can change that. By putting more thought into who we’re creating documentation for and some friendly reminders around how we create it, we can end up with documentation we’re proud of. Continue reading →

Turning Documentation Into (Unit Testing) Action

Posted on by nosnhojn

A hypothetical for design engineers… what if there were an online tool useful for both documenting your RTL and bootstrapping a testbench. Would you use it?

The tool is Wavedrom. It’s an open source tool hosted at wavedrom.com. You may already use it for documentation. I’ve used it in the past for documenting BFM behaviour. It’s accessible, easy to use and the output is clear. Highly recommended.

If you haven’t seen Wavedrom before you should load it up to see what it can do. By default, it comes up with a simple req/ack data transfer to illustrate the basics. The input is JSON which is pretty easy to work with. Output can be exported as PNG or SVG.

If you want to try something from scratch to see what it’d look like, you can paste in this APB write transaction… Continue reading →

Unit Testing UVM Sequences

Posted on by nosnhojn

Next to unit testing UVM drivers, which was the topic of Testing UVM Drivers (Without The Sequencer), the second most popular question for which I had no good answer has been “How can I use SVUnit to test my UVM sequences?”.

Thankfully, SVMock seems to have made life easier here as well. With SVMock we can isolate a sequence from sequencer and driver such that it can be unit tested on it’s own before it’s used as part of a larger system. Here’s an example of how it works. Continue reading →

Building An Integrated Verification Flow

Posted on by nosnhojn

If you’ve been following my blog since DVCon earlier this year, you’ll have noticed that the introduction of portable stimulus has me thinking more in terms of integrated verification flows. Specifically, where our verification techniques are best applied and how they complement each other as part of a complete flow.

At DAC, I had an opportunity to summarize some of these ideas in a 30min presentation called Building An Integrated Verification Flow. That happened in the Verification Academy booth. Audience was small’ish at the conference, but the good news is all the sessions were recorded. So you can see Building An Integrated Verification Flow posted on the Verification Academy site.

For backstory, here’s a list of the relevant posts since Feb…

Still more to come on this topic of integrated verification flows so stay tuned!

-neil