OVM Innovation Means Business

Today, Cadence recognized it's OVM team for their innovative contribution to the Cadence enterprise starting in 2008.  Why enterprise?  To me, enterprise is the most exciting part because it underscore how the OVM has rallied all of Cadence verification around a common cause which has both polished our image as the verification leader and created new business opportunities.

To understand the impact, we need to step back to 2007.  SystemVerilog implementations were just coming together and VMM was a mix of SystemVerilog and Vera.  e and eRM, on the other hand, were well established with years of success at this point.  So why OVM?  To unify the ecosystem.  OVM was the first open, multi-vendor, scalable methodology architected for multi-language.  Looking back, this statement seemed simple enough, but the simplicity is the innovation.

Open.  It doesn't get more simple than that, but it was a rallying point in the marketing and development that changed everything.  The OVM started as both Apache licensed and multi-vendor and, in fact, remains the only verification methodology embodying both.  With a community now 8000+ strong as measured on the OVM World website, the marketing and development simplicity certainly resonated.

Scalable.  The OVM introduced to the SystemVerilog community the agent-architecture used by the e community for years.  The concept itself is simple -- a consistent way to describe verification components for reuse -- but is backed by a sophisticated implementation.  The innovation here is all technical -- place the burden of complexity on the methodology/library developer and provide the consumer with ease of use.

Creative: Building on past success was important, but new solutions were needed to win the hearts and minds of the nascent SystemVerilog community.  The development team built an advanced factory mechanism, field automation, test classes and test selection mechanism, and more many of which have found their way into competing libraries due to that bold move to be open.  As the next point will show, the team has never looked back.  The creative stream is still flowing with callbacks, configuration mechanism, OVM multi-language capabilities, and much more.

Passionate.  Did that one surprise you?  If you have talked to anyone from the extended OVM team -- and there are hundreds of us -- that is our simple connection.  I've been with Cadence for 18+ years and working with the OVM rekindled the start-up in us.  We argued.  We fought.  We united and we delivered.   And we are still doing that today.  The simplicity of that emotive drive assures that you get the best out of us all the time, every time.  Maybe that was latent in the team for a while, but we are certainly bringing it now.  And for those on the internal team, you know we were doing that even today.  :-)

I know this blog was a "pat on the back" for the OVM team, but we all need to step back from time to time and assess ourselves.  We're proud of the innovation we have brought to verification and even more proud to say we ain't done yet!

=Adam Sherilog on behalf of the whole OVM team