Functional Verification Blogs

In the previous blog: Concurrent Actions in Specman , we discussed the existing options: all of ( which awaits completion of all branches) and first of (which terminates at the first completion of any branch). In 19.03 we added enhancement on top of these existing options, we made them more dynamic. In all the examples in the previous blog, the number of branches was constant (all the examples used 2 branches). What...

The Red Hat Summit is coming around to Boston this year, and it’s only a few short days away. Cadence has a demo at the Marvell booth (that’s #418-1), and we’ll be there from 3-7 PM on Wednesday, May 8 th . There, we’ll be showing off our Arm-server technology by demoing Xcelium. Be sure to stop by! Cadence and Arm have worked together to create solutions that optimize power, performance, and area while speeding up...

The HOST Symposium is returning for its 12 th year, and general registration is open now. The IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) aims to accelerate and assist the development of hardware-based security technologies. With the advent of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, new avenues of attack have opened up for nefarious hackers—what was previously focused on computers, defense...

Sorting according to pointers- why? One of the best practices that you need to follow when using Specman or any other tool is to use a linting tool on a regular basis to catch bugs early. In Specman, we frequently add additional e checks to HAL (Cadence linting tool) based on the customer issues that can be avoided or caught during linting. For instance, in 19.03, among few other linting checks, we planned to add...

On March 28th, 2019, Cadence Design Systems announced an expanded collaboration with Northrop Grumman centering on advanced-node SoC projects. Cadence’s cutting-edge verification tools are combining with Northrup Grumman’s expertise to deliver high performance ASICs more efficiently. Northrop Grumman will be using the full flow of Cadence ASIC development tools including verification, digital synthesis and implementation...

On March 14th, Cadence announced the release of the industry’s first USB4-supporting Verification IP! The Cadence VIP for USB4 allows engineers to design and create cutting-edge SoC designs compliant with the current standards that are completely functionally verified and require less time. “Support from [USB Implementers Forum] members like Cadence helps reduce the barriers to adoption of new USB protocols and enables...

Lately we have been asked by several customers about the concurrency options in Specman (some refer to it as “What are the Specman options similar to fork…join?”). Apparently, things that are in Specman for ages are likely to be missed. Therefore, this blog describes Specman concurrent actions (existing for years). Specman has two actions controlling concurrent execution: all of and first of. Both actions create parallel...

Another successful DVCon U.S. 2019 has come and gone, but this year had a particularly interesting highlight. With nearly 900 attendees, a bigger program of tutorials, panels, papers, and posters, and a sold-out expo, the Best Paper award was even more prestigious than ever before. This year, the award was renamed to the Stuart Sutherland Best Paper Presentation. Stu was a leading Verliog and SystemVerilog expert, and...

Recently, Bosch Sensortec has been using Specman for their functional verification needs in their Inertial Measurement Unit, and they’re loving it. Why is Specman so cool? Well, it’s implementing the familiar UVM in e, which provides the tools and infrastructure to easily build extendable, maintainable, and reusable verification components. If you use Specman, you’ll see big productivity increases. For a lot of common...

If you’re leaving 2018 with the feeling that your SystemVerilog skills are lacking, don’t worry—there’s a new series of Cadence Training Bytes to help you hit the ground running in 2019. Here you’ll find eight new YouTube videos all about SystemVerilog classes. You can find the first video here . Here’s a quick table of contents: SystemVerilog Classes 1: Basics This video goes over the basics of what a SystemVerilog...

If you are lucky enough and your company spends a few working days each year on a Hackathon, you must know that it is usually a lot of fun. The latest 2018 Hackathon in Cadence was all about Machine Learning. We, in Specman R&D, debated a bit around how to approach the topic since Machine Learning means a lot of different things in our industry. Take a look at the following interesting article: Where ML works best in...

Recently, Renesas Electronics Corporation faced a challenge. They were developing a new data conversion block, one that included an AHB bus bridge, which would be attached to a pre-existing DMA IP core. There was also a complicated finite state machine involved in this new block. Renesas didn’t have a whole lot of time on their hands—they needed a quick turnaround time, but only had a limited amount of engineers to accomplish...

Veriest , a member of the Cadence Verification Alliance , is holding a series of Meetups in Serbia to serve the growing technology community. The December 12th event will feature a session on Specman Elite macros and how they help with reusability and maintainability. Veriest is a long time Verification Alliance member, and recently co-authored a paper with Valens on DVCon on the same topic: " Learn How Valens uses...

On October 16, 2018, Cadence Design Systems, Inc announced that, through a wide-reaching system design enablement collaboration, the Cadence Verification Suite is ready for use on Arm®-based high-performance computing (HPC) server environments. Now, all of the Cadence verification software tools you know and love—including Xcelium Simulator—can be run on the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Apollo 70 system, which uses...

Valens has achieved success through applying Specman to their verification projects. At DVCon EMEA (Oct 24-25) you can learn how their use of Specman Macros to automate configuration of the verification environment to their design. This saves them effort and lowers the learning curve for engineers who jump from project to project. In collaboration with Veriest Verification Ltd , a Cadence Connections Verification partner...

Cadence® Specman® Elite delivers faster and higher quality verification at block, chip, and system levels. The tool is cloud ready, supports industry-standard verification languages, and is compatible with the Open Verification Methodology (OVM), the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), and the eReuse Methodology (eRM), so you can quickly and easily integrate it with established verification flows. Attend our...

Specman 18.09: Avoiding the Small Annoying Mistakes In almost every industry, one has the potential of making a small mistake that may cost hours or days to find. The following interesting article takes the small mistakes to the extreme and mentions a few cases of small mistakes that had a huge effect: Messing up big time: 10 tiny mistakes that have caused HUGE problems . How is it relevant to Specman? As a verification...

Welcome back to the fourth installment of a special multi-part edition of the App Note Spotlight, where we’ll continue highlighting an interesting app note that you may have overlooked— Simulation Performance Coding Guidelines for SystemVerilog . This app note overviews all sorts of coding guidelines and helpful tips to help optimize your SystemVerilog code’s performance. These strategies aren’t specific to just the...

Join us on September 14th for a free one-hour webinar on the finer aspects of the UVM register layer. We’ll be focusing on key aspects of the UVM Register Layer that can help you with your UVM modeling in ways you may not be aware of. We’ll be covering the following topics: How to use user-defined front doors and back doors to expand what the register layer can do Understanding the role played by the predictor...

One animation video - Patch Like The Wind - is worth a thousand words :) If you don’t use Specman or don’t use Specman correctly, you spend most of your time waiting for compilation to finish. One of the most frustrating (and common…) scenarios is when you know more or less what the fix should be (such as, “wait additional cycle before sending” or “the variable should be int and not uint”) and the fix can be...

Services like facial detection, efficient cloud server workload management, artificial intelligence, and image enhancement are all the rage these days; but creating a design to accommodate these needs can be incredibly taxing on your engineering resources. Luckily, Netspeed Systems is here to help. The devices being designed nowadays are more complicated than ever, and the design requirements are more complex, too...

We’re going to take a wild guess and say you’ve been in a meeting before. Maybe it was a virtual meeting—but those never really feel the same in person, do they? Attending a virtual meeting can feel cold and impersonal, especially since you can barely see everyone else. Everyone is there except you—and even then, saying you’re “there” is a bit of a stretch. Nowadays, though, there’s technology to remedy this problem...

Here’s something to chew on: Syntiant is an AI startup involved in deep learning technology and semiconductor design. Their goal is to create exceptionally low-power designs for always-on devices, like those used in speech detection. Syntiant went from empty air to tapeout in six months. That sounds hard to believe, but it’s true. They got their first venture-capital funding in October of 2017, taped out initial...

Welcome back to our series on cloud verification solutions. This is the final part of a three-part blog—you can read part one here and part two here . Now, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for: what can Cadence do for you in the realm of cloud verification. Are you ready? In case you saw that list of qualities one should look for in a cloud partner in the last part of this blog, and wondered who ticks all those...

Freedom of choice is a term we hear a lot, especially in the last 10 years. It is defined in wikipedia as “an individual's opportunity and autonomy to perform an action selected from at least two available options…”. Is having many choices always a good thing? Well, usually it is- who would not want to live in a world where s/he has options and can make choices? However, there are also downsides to having multiple...