Where’s The “You” In The OVM?

Cadence and Mentor have dedicated teams to the development and support of the OVM and you, our user community, have literally tens of thousands of developers dedicated to developing reusable VIP with it.  But where do “you” and the OVM meet?

Sometimes the “you” is obvious – the OVM World Forum.  With 1100+ unique threads and 4500+ posts, the OVM Forum is by far the most active testbench and reuse site.  Every day users interact with the Cadence/Mentor development and support teams, as well as others in the OVM ecosystem, in an open community.  Topics range from beginner questions, to enhancement and bug requests, to OVM contributions support, and beyond. Combined with trade-show presentations and webinars, the forums are by far the most public, open face of a testbench methodology.

Speaking of OVM contributions, this is another area on OVM World that is about “you” in a big way. If you have ideas for extensions to the OVM, contribute them! They will be given full consideration for inclusion in future releases. In the meantime, “you” can all share each other’s great ideas.

And sometimes the “you” is less obvious, but may be even more mission-critical.  Because your OVM experience depends in part on the methodology/library and in part on the tool suite, some enhancements and bug requests are reported directly to the EDA vendors supporting and developing the OVM solutions.  In the case of Mentor and Cadence, we use these reports to fix bugs in the OVM source code.  Since these are often accompanied by customer-proprietary examples the bug reports themselves are retained by each EDA provider, but we do exchange simplified examples so that we can jointly produce OVM updates. This effort results in two benefits for OVM users – responses within contractual support timelines to assure the success of their critical projects and bug-fix updates to the OVM downloads. Cadence and Mentor produced two updates to the OVM 2.0 release using this process and a third one – OVM 2.0.3 – is coming in November.

And we can’t forget the OAG – the OVM Advisory Group.  This organization of OVM users provides direct guidance for the OVM, and the member companies are publicly identified. The OVM roadmap, presented on the floor of DAC in July and available on OVM World, is a direct result of the OAG. This group will expand over time so that more of “you” can participate directly.

So where is the “you” in the OVM?  It’s everywhere – in the public face of OVM World and in the private relationship users have with their EDA partners.

=Adam Sherilog