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Improving Tests Efficiency Using Coverage Callback (part 2)

By teamspecman | 28 Jun 2020

In recent blogs - specman-callback-coverage-api and improving-tests-efficiency-using-coverage-callback - we shared some ideas about how to employ the new Coverage Callback API for increasing the tests efficiency. This blog shows two more ideas for improving tests, using runtime coverage information. Stop the Run After the Goal Is Reached The basic concept of Coverage Driven Verification is running many random tests...

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Specman | Functional Verification | Coverage-Driven Verification | e | e language
Training Insights - Comprehensive RTL Signoff Using JasperGold Superlint App

By Nizar Hanna | 15 Jun 2020

Most have heard the phrase "time is money". Thinking more about it, probably the right phrase would be "time is more valuable than money". People look at their bank accounts with great attention but don't tend to look at their time the same way, ending up wasting this greatly valuable and important resource. You can gain money using time, but you can’t use money to purchase more time. The “Shift Left” concept has been...

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Functional Verification | bugs | RTL | formal | RTL designer Signoff | webinar | assertions | Lint | Superlint
Improving Tests Efficiency Using Coverage Callback

By teamspecman | 31 May 2020

When you go to the store, you walk until you get there, stop, get your groceries, and go back home. You do not start circling around the block for few rounds. You do not say “if I walk around the block really fast, I can save time”. It is clear that if you avoid circling the block at first place – you will save even more time. Why don’t we adopt the same rationale in the verification process? Instead of thinking just...

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Specman | coverage | Functional Verification | Specman e | Coverage-Driven Verification | e | verification
Specman’s Callback Coverage API

By teamspecman | 30 Apr 2020

Our customers’ tests have become more complex, longer, and consume more resources than before. This increases the need to optimize the regression while not compromising on coverage. Some advanced customers of Specman use Machine Learning based solutions to optimize the regressions while some use simpler solutions. Based on a request of an advanced customer, we added a new Coverage API in Specman 19.09 called Coverage...

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Specman | Specman/e | Specman coverage engine | coverage | Specman e | specman elite | Coverage Driven Verification
Metamorphic Testing: The Future of Verification?

By XTeam | 16 Apr 2020

Curious about what’s going on behind the scenes with verification? Bernard Murphy, Jim Hogan, and our own Paul Cunningham are on the case with the “Innovation in Verification” blog stream over at semiwiki.com . Every month, this trio reviews a newly-published paper in academia that pertains to verification and discusses its implications. Be sure to stop by—it’s a great place to see what might be coming down the pipeline...

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Functional Verification | Semiwiki | metamorphic testing
RAK Attack: Better Driver Tracing, Faster Palladium Build Time, UVM Register Map Automation

By XTeam | 14 Mar 2020

Looking to learn? There's a bunch of new RAKs (Rapid Adoption Kits) available online now! 1) Indago 19.09 Better Driver Tracing and More Are you new to Indago and not sure where to start? Luckily, there’s a new Rapid Adoption Kit for you: the Indago 19.09 Overview RAK! This neat package contains everything you need to get your debugging started through Indago. In four short labs, plus a brief introductory lab, you...

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Rapid Adoption Kit | IXCOM | RAK | Indago | JasperGold
A Specman/e Syntax for Sublime Text 3

By teamspecman | 5 Feb 2020

We're happy to have guest blogger Thorsten Dworzak, Principal Consultant at Verilab GmbH, describe how he added Specman/e syntax to Sublime Text 3: According to the 2018 StackOverflow Developer Survey , the popularity of development environments (IDEs, Text Editors) among software developers shows the following ranking: Visual Studio Code 34.9% Visual Studio 34.3% Notepad++ 34.2% Sublime Text 28.9% Vim...

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Specman | Specman/e | Specman e | Sublime Text | specman elite
Specman: Analyze Your Coverage with Python

By teamspecman | 6 Nov 2019

In the former blog about Python and Specman: Specman: Python Is here! , we described the technical information around Specman-Python integration. Since Python provides so many easy to use existing libraries in various fields, it is very tempting to leverage these cool Python apps. Coverage has always been the center of the verification methodology, however in the last few years it gets even more focus as people develop...

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Specman | Specman coverage engine | coverage | Python | Functional Verification | Specman e | e | e language | specman elite | functional coverage
Automotive Security in the World of Tomorrow - Part 2 of 2

By XTeam | 22 Aug 2019

If you missed the first part of this series, you can find it here . So: what does Green Hills Software propose we do? The issue of “solving security” is, at its core, impossible—security can never be 100% assured. What we can do is make it as difficult as possible for security holes to develop. This can be done in a couple ways; one is to make small code in small packs executed by a “safing plan”—having each individual...

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security | automotive | Functional Verification | Green Hills Software
Automotive Security in the World of Tomorrow - Part 1 of 2

By XTeam | 21 Aug 2019

Autonomous vehicles are coming. In a statistic from the U.S. Department of Transportation , about 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2018. Having safe, fully automatic vehicles could drastically reduce that number—but the trick is figuring out how to make an autonomous vehicle safe. Internet-enabled systems in cars are more common than ever, and it’s unlikely that the use of them will slow or...

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security | automotive | Functional Verification | Green Hills Software
Tales from DAC: Altair's HERO Is Your Hero

By XTeam | 29 Jul 2019

Emulators are great. They vastly speed up verification to the point where it’s hard to imagine life without them; as designs grow in complexity, simple simulation can’t keep up for the biggest designs. The extra oomph from emulation is almost a necessity for the top percentages of design sizes. However, many users of Palladium aren’t efficiently using their unit’s processing power, and as a result they’re missing out...

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Cadence Theater | HERO | Palladium | Altair Engineering | DAC 2019
Tales from DAC: Semiconductor Design in MY Cloud? It's More Likely Than You Think

By XTeam | 24 Jul 2019

Everyone keeps talking about “the cloud” this and “the cloud” that these days—but you’re a semiconductor designer. Everyone keeps saying “the cloud” is revolutionizing all aspects of electronics design—but what does it mean for you? Cadence's own Tom Hackett discussed this in a presentation at the Cadence Theater during DAC 2019. What people refer to as “the cloud” is commonly divided into three categories: Infrastructure...

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DAC 2019 | Semiconductor | cadence cloud
Tales from DAC: Cadence, AI, and You

By XTeam | 18 Jul 2019

Complexity is driving the urgency for advanced artificial intelligence systems more than ever—and that means someone has to supply the tools to create those systems. Cadence is up to the task: we’ve been expanding our AI offerings. If you haven’t already seen what Cadence can do for your AI needs, or if you’re not quite up-to-date on this whole AI boom, let this presentation given by K.T. Moore at the Cadence Theater...

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Functional Verification | Cadence Theater | DAC 2019 | Tensilica | AI
Tales from DAC: A Meeting of Security's Heroes at the Accellera Luncheon (Part 2 of 2)

By XTeam | 25 Jun 2019

Welcome back to this account of the IP Security Panel at the Accellera Luncheon at DAC 2019. We’ve covered who’s seated on the panel and the moderator’s questions in the last installment (link to first blog)—now it’s time to talk about what the audience had to ask. The first question asked was related to that morning’s keynote speaker, and that speaker’s one criteria for IP developers with regards to security: do they...

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security | luncheon | DAC 2019 | Panel | Accellera
Tales from DAC: A Meeting of Security's Heroes at the Accellera Luncheon (Part 1 of 2)

By XTeam | 24 Jun 2019

Figure 1: The panel and crowd Citizens—the tech world is in trouble. With the ever-expanding size and complexity of chip designs, security hasn’t kept up. Old techniques for securing a design are no longer sufficient—and with IoT devices expanding into every facet of a person’s life, security is more important than ever. The often-joked-about case of someone hacking your refrigerator isn’t strictly a joke—without...

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security | luncheon | DAC 2019 | Panel | Accellera
Master of ‘e’? Now You Can Prove It!

By teamspecman | 19 Jun 2019

The knowledge and experience of using Specman/ e tells everyone that you have acquired profound verification methodology. But how do you showcase this knowledge to your company, colleagues, and perspective employers? To help you showcase your expertise, Cadence Training Services now offers Cadence Digital Badging . A certification test was created for some technologies (including Specman). When you pass the certification...

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Specman | Specman/e | Specman e | badge | e | e language | specman elite
Specman: Python Is here!

By teamspecman | 12 Jun 2019

Do you know from where Python technology gets its name? It is not from the snake, it is named after the Monty Python comedy group. And indeed, one of the main guidelines behind it is to be fun to use (check out the Zen of Python ). Therefore, Python is intuitive, readable, and easy to learn - all of these make it not only fun to use but also highly productive. Does this sound familiar? If you are an e user, it should...

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Specman/e | Python | Specman e | machine learning | specman elite
Got IP Security Questions? This Luncheon at DAC Has Answers

By XTeam | 30 May 2019

If you’ve got security on the mind—and in this day and age, who doesn’t?—and you’re planning to attend DAC, be sure to stop by the Accellera-sponsored Luncheon Focusing on IP Security Assurance Issues Led by Panel of Industry Experts. There, you’ll hear a short update on what Accellera’s been up to by Accellera Chair Lu Dai, and then the experts will jump right into a panel discussion covering all sorts of IP security...

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security | DAC | luncheon | DAC 2019 | Accellera
Thinci Finds Success with the Cadence Verification Suite

By XTeam | 28 May 2019

On May 23rd, 2019, Cadence announced that Thinci has elected to use the complete Cadence Verification Suite to speed up the verification of their machine-learning and AI designs. Now, Thinci can access the new technologies available through the Cadence Verification Suite to shorten their product development time by months while improving verification coverage. “We selected the Cadence Verification Suite because it...

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ThinCi | Functional Verification | cadence verification suite | success story | verification
Concurrent Actions in Specman: Part 2

By teamspecman | 8 May 2019

In the previous blog: Concurrent Actions in Specman , we discussed the existing options: all of ( which awaits completion of all branches) and first of (which terminates at the first completion of any branch). In 19.03 we added enhancement on top of these existing options, we made them more dynamic. In all the examples in the previous blog, the number of branches was constant (all the examples used 2 branches). What...

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Specman | Specman/e | Specman e | concurrency | specman elite
Cadence at the Red Hat Summit--Come See Xcelium in Action!

By XTeam | 1 May 2019

The Red Hat Summit is coming around to Boston this year, and it’s only a few short days away. Cadence has a demo at the Marvell booth (that’s #418-1), and we’ll be there from 3-7 PM on Wednesday, May 8 th . There, we’ll be showing off our Arm-server technology by demoing Xcelium. Be sure to stop by! Cadence and Arm have worked together to create solutions that optimize power, performance, and area while speeding up...

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Functional Verification | red hat summit | xcelium | event
Cadence at the HOST Symposium: Come See What We're Doing!

By XTeam | 1 May 2019

The HOST Symposium is returning for its 12 th year, and general registration is open now. The IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) aims to accelerate and assist the development of hardware-based security technologies. With the advent of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, new avenues of attack have opened up for nefarious hackers—what was previously focused on computers, defense...

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host | Functional Verification | symposium | event
Specman Linting and the all_unique Method

By teamspecman | 29 Apr 2019

Sorting according to pointers- why? One of the best practices that you need to follow when using Specman or any other tool is to use a linting tool on a regular basis to catch bugs early. In Specman, we frequently add additional e checks to HAL (Cadence linting tool) based on the customer issues that can be avoided or caught during linting. For instance, in 19.03, among few other linting checks, we planned to add...

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Cadence Announces Continued Partnership With Northrop Grumman

By XTeam | 1 Apr 2019

On March 28th, 2019, Cadence Design Systems announced an expanded collaboration with Northrop Grumman centering on advanced-node SoC projects. Cadence’s cutting-edge verification tools are combining with Northrup Grumman’s expertise to deliver high performance ASICs more efficiently. Northrop Grumman will be using the full flow of Cadence ASIC development tools including verification, digital synthesis and implementation...

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chip design | Functional Verification | press release | Northrop Grumman
Cadence Leads the Pack: The First VIP for USB4 is Here!

By XTeam | 1 Apr 2019

On March 14th, Cadence announced the release of the industry’s first USB4-supporting Verification IP! The Cadence VIP for USB4 allows engineers to design and create cutting-edge SoC designs compliant with the current standards that are completely functionally verified and require less time. “Support from [USB Implementers Forum] members like Cadence helps reduce the barriers to adoption of new USB protocols and enables...

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Functional Verification | VIP | usb4 | press release

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