Early Adopter release of UVM now available

Accellera has been working on a new industry-standard verification methodology called the UVM (Universal Verification Methodology) and an Early Adopter release is now available here if you wish to start using the UVM today. The UVM distribution kit contains a User Guide, a Reference Manual, and an open-source reference implementation of the work completed to date. Mentor’s Dennis Brophy wrote a blog last month that said Accellera had voted to base the UVM on the OVM 2.1.1 (Open Verification Methodology) spec and the technical committee was then modifying the OVM 2.1.1 spec by changing file names containing “OVM” to “UVM,” changing “ovm” to “uvm” in function calls and element names, making changes to the “end-of-test” and “callback” code found in OVM 2.1.1, and adding a “report catching” mechanism for filtering out warning messages that the verification engineer designates irrelevant.

Quoting Cadence's Adam Sherer who is the secretary of Accellera's VIP subcommittee, Cadence’s Richard Goering writes in his blog today “Current OVM users have it easy. UVM 1.0 EA is essentially OVM 2.1.1 with a few additions. UVM 1.0 EA is a clean superset of OVM 2.1.1, and it offers backwards compatibility with OVM. Since OVM 2.1.1 is in production flows today, and anything that's been added is clearly identified in the release notes, the so-called ‘early adopter’ release of UVM is really production-ready.”

Note: Denali's verification IP already supports UVM.