DeepChip Best of 2020: vManager

We just finished 2020 (and let's hope 2021 is a better year). Every year, John Cooley runs a "best of EDA" survey, in which users vote on the best EDA products. This year, #2a on John's list is Cadence's vManager Verification Management. John announced it on DeepChip on a page titled Cadence vManager saves 1 hour/day/engineer is Best of 2020 #2a. This is a long piece with over 5,000 words from users of vManager about their experience.

I covered the basics of what vManager does in my post vManager: One Manager to Rule Them All. However, I am not somebody who uses vManager on a day-to-day basis like the users quoted in John's announcement.

In John's piece, he sets up the basic challenge of verification:

Time is Money: Cadence vManager is all about "metric-driven" verification. Set up your verification plan and your metrics to track the requirements in your spec. Then run regressions, do failure analysis and triage, and optimize coverage—all while you're tracking your metrics against each requirement until you hit coverage closure weeks or months later.

The "winner" is the one who can get verification closure done the quickest, so they can tape-out, manufacture the SoC, sell it on the world market as they laugh all the way to the bank—while his competitor is still trying to get his own SoC closed. In the chip business, Time is Money.

Some users of vManager told John (and no, I don't know who these users are, this is all anonymous):

"Savings work out to 1 man-year less for each 12 man-year project."

"Compared to how we used to verify, vManager saves each engineer at least 1 hour a day, every day."

"For our projects that run for 12 months or more, I'd estimate our time savings just for failure analysis alone is 20% less."

"I would say vManager saves us 1/2 an hour to 1 hour per project engineer per day."

Paul Cunningham likes to talk about the importance of logistics in verification. For example, see my post about his recent DVCon keynote Paul Cunningham's DVCon Keynote: Verification Throughput = Engines × Logistics. The above quotes make it clear just how important the logistics part of that equation is. The saving in resources is characterized in a different way in each of the quotes, but it is 15-20%. Given how big a fraction of overall design effort goes into verification, this is a significant saving in overall project cost.

There is a lot of detail about how verification groups are using vManager on the DeepChip page linked above. There are whole sections on:

• Man-hour savings
• Verification planning
• Launching and managing regressions
• Failure analysis and assigning failures
• Coverage
• Reporting
• vManager and metric-driven verification across our team

vManager has been around for a long time, originally coming to Cadence via the Verisity acquisition in 2005. But in the last two or three years, we have invested a lot in making vManager a true enterprise-level tool, supporting geographically distributed verification group, the cloud (see below), and multiple concurrent projects. One of the anonymous users emphasized the changes:

We've used Cadence vManager for about 10 years for verification planning and metric analysis. It serves as our central portal for our entire team's verification efforts—from planning to execution to reporting and closure. The vManager of today is vastly different than the vManager of 2016. We use vManager to manage our verification efforts for Xcelium, Palladium, Protium, JasperGold, and some of our internal tools.

Another aspect of vManager, and our verification environment in general, is that it is cloud-ready. More than ready, many users actively do verification in the cloud. There are never enough servers in an on-premises data center for all the verification runs that are required. But the cloud has an effectively infinite pool of machines. As an experiment, Cadence and Arm did a library characterization using over 50,000 cores, admittedly an extreme case. But here is a quote from a user of Cadence's verification portfolio in the cloud:

First, it is worth noting that our entire verification environment is in the AWS cloud. We have a full environment there—Xcelium, vManager, our verification IP, etc. Cadence maintains the full environment, so we don't need to install the software or update it.

Since John gets to see all the contributions from users and knows who they are, even though they are anonymous in the announcement, I called him up to get a bit more color on how vManager was generally perceived:

There were basically some big changes around 2016. Until that point, vManager was a bit of a dog, but now it is a racehorse.

A final anonymous recommendation from a user (and no, not a Cadence marketing person!):

I would recommend vManager to other teams, just as it is something our team needs for managing our verification plan in terms of regressions and functional coverage.

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