OVM Is The Safest Bet By 2:1

One of the questions verification engineers will be asking as they head to DVCon in two weeks is "do I bet on OVM or VMM".  According to the poll conducted by Harry Gries in his Harry the ASIC Guy blog, you should go "all in" on the OVM because it is the 2:1 favorite.  Those are great odds!

Over here at Cadence we were pondering the same question and started by estimating the world wide verification community at 15,000 engineers.  My colleague Joe Hupcey and I arrived at that number by doing some calculations based on the number of verification licenses we have, the EDAC numbers, and a bottom-up customer analysis.  We focused on engineers using HVLs to separate the design and verification communities.  Our next step was to objectively split that community based on OVM and VMM usage and what we came up with supports Harry's methodology numbers perfectly.

10,000 of the 15,000 verification engineers are using the OVM with SystemVerilog and eRM with e.  The 10,000 splits into roughly 6000 on the OVM (based on the number of engineers registered with the OVM World now) and 4000 eRM users (based on the e users in the Team Specman blog, the Specman Yahoo group, and the others below).  We can combine these to 10K because both eRM and OVM implement the same methodology - a methodology with proven reuse for several years and across thousands of projects and the broadest, deepest VIP portfolio.  If we assume the rest of the verification engineers are using VMM and legacy Vera/RVM, then we roll-up to the same 2:1 ratio as Harry.

These tough economic times can make it hard to make resource decisions. With 2:1 odds favoring the OVM, at least the verification methodology decision is clear!

So where are you placing your bets?

=Adam Sheriblog

Additional e communities: IEEE 1647 working group, Avidan Efody's "Specman Verification" site, Yaron Ilani's "Think Verification" blog