DAC 2009 News: Specman 9.2 Highlights + Beta Program Invitation

27 Jul 2009 • 1 minute read

Specmaniacs,

With the start of DAC 2009, Team Specman is excited to finally be able to make public what we have in store for you in Specman/IES-XL version 9.2 this September. Additionally, consider this post an open invitation to join the 9.2 beta program that officially starts next week on Monday August 3.

If you are at DAC, please seek out the Specmaniacs at DAC listed in our last post to learn more. Otherwise, your local AE can give you more details.

Finally, as the beta program progresses, look for members of Specman R&D -- specifically, the engineers who architected and wrote a given 9.2 capability -- to be guest blogging about "their" feature(s). That's right: Specmaniacs will hear directly from Specman R&D engineers, with this forum enabling you to give direct feedback to them. (Don't hold back! ;-)

Happy beta testing!

Team Specman

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The main areas of Specman 9.2 technology enhancements are as follows.

IntelliGen
The ever widening adoption of IntelliGen has inspired a number of requests to improve usability and debug-ability. Hence, in 9.2 the following capabilities have been added:
- "Range Viewer":see ranges and sub-ranges and find out which constraints caused certain ranges to be disabled
- "Named constraints": enables you to switch off constraints
- Constraint Debugger GUI also features various constraint debug improvements

Coverage
- e code coverage (block coverage) is now supported
- By default, coverage in units is collected by instance; structs can also be collected by default.

OVM e
- 9.2 includes a new scoreboard infrastructure package
- More fine-grained access to various steps of 'do' gives more flexibility and performance

Interfaces
- TLM ports enhancements:
    -- OVM style naming
    -- directional binding
    -- support for broadcasting on analysis ports
- OSCI 2.2 support

Language
- new e linting flow (integrated with the standard Cadence "HAL" flow)

IES-XL integration/debug
- Source debug and browsing in SimVision
- SimVision e support waveform improvements
- Assertion callback support for SVA

General "Logistics"
- Cadence standard installation (you only need to put the 'bin' directory on your path)
- Improved Help (CDNSHelp 1.2) with many improvements
   -- multiple library and PDF search
-- support for bookmarks
   -- ranked search