IntelliGen Moving Into The Spotlight With Pgen Deprecation

25 Jun 2010 • 1 minute read

Specman's new Aspect Oriented Generation Engine, IntelliGen, has now been in service for several years and we have received much positive feedback from customers in terms of ease of use, solvability, coverage and performance. For more information on IntelliGen, check out the following links, as well as other blogs written in this forum.

Customers employing extremely challenging generation scenarios have been particularly receptive to migrating to IntelliGen. We know that many customers are in the process of migrating to IntelliGen on their current project, or are about to do so on the next project coming down the pipe. With the adoption rate of IntelliGen continually increasing, there must come a point where the current default generation engine of Specman Elite (Pgen) must move out of the spotlight and be replaced by the new IntelliGen engine.

And so it is that, after many years of faithful service in helping to tape out thousands of ASIC's and SoC's, Specman Elite's original generation engine, Pgen, will begin the deprecation process starting with the 10.2 release coming later this year. The deprecation process will start with a deprecation warning message issued to Pgen users. The message will state that Pgen has begun the deprecation process and that, in a future release, IntelliGen will become the default generation engine. It will also mention how to get more information on steps needed to migrate to IntelliGen. Pgen will remain the default generation engine in the 10.2 release and, other than the warning message, the generation behavior will remain as Pgen.

Moving forward, there are many new and exciting products coming down the pipe based on IntelliGen functionality and we highly recommend users to migrate to IntelliGen ASAP. If you are concerned about Verification IP availability, all Cadence VIP (except one) has been migrated and is available for use now.

At some yet-to-be-determined release down the road, the default generator of Specman Elite will be switched over to IntelliGen. At that point, a deprecation error will be emitted for users. However, if you have not migrated to IntelliGen yet, you can still use the Pgen generation engine by setting a configuration parameter.

Happy bug finding everyone!

Corey Goss