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There is a cool feature in the OVM library and Incisive Enterprise Simulator that comes to the rescue.  It is the built-in OVM transaction recording.

Modern metric driven testbenches generate a lot of dynamic data on the fly during a simulation…

Simulation is a huge topic.  Performance, debug, mixed-signal, low-power, assertions, coverage, IEEE languages, lint checking, interfaces, and much more.  Many of us started using simulation when it was gates and waveforms while others joined in the era of complex, multi-language, testbench-driven simulation. Regardless, the pace of design and verification is accellerating for all of us.  So how can we get those pearls of…

[Team Specman welcomes Principal Support Application Engineer Avi Farjoun to share some important tips on the famous “vhdlsync” switch]

As users with mixed VHDL and Verilog environments know, even in this day & age mixed HDL simulation cycle semantics are not very well defined.  Even worse: there is no standard that specifies the order of execution of always blocks and VHDL processes, which can lead to simulation…

As noted in a prior post, I had the pleasure of attending a DVClub talk given by Brian Bailey entitled "Is it time to declare verification war?". As suggested by the word "war" title, Brian drew many analogies between the legendary text The Art of War by the Chinese general Sun Tzu, and the strategic and tactical challenges of verifying a complex device under test (DUT), complemented by introductions…

Yeah, right...in this economy, don't talk to me about real estate.  But I'm not talking about home prices, I'm talking about that territory on the screen right in front of you where you spend your day drawing and clicking and arranging and rearranging in order to accomplish your job.  Cadence has given you lots of tools to help you develop your little plot of land.  Just recently in this blog, I've told you about…

For those Specmaniacs using the REAL number data type & ports capabilities in Specman, you might be interested in a webinar our analog colleagues are hosting tomorrow (June 10) from 07:00- 8:15 AM (PDT) and a second broadcast at 10:00 -11:15 AM (PDT).  Specifically, the webinar is titled "How to Boost Performance for Mixed Signal SoC Top-level Verification", and it will address how to handle mixed signal design…

If you listened to Tom's advice on this blog two months ago and registered for the International Microwave Symposium or the RFIC symposium, then you should be at the Boston Convention center now enjoying RFIC talks. Please remember that we are waiting...

As noted in white papers, prior posts, and the Specman documentation, since IntelliGen is a totally new stimulus generator than the original "PGEN", there is usually some amount of effort needed to migrate an existing verification environment to fully leverage the power of IntelliGen.  To help expedite this process, I've just posted in the Community's Shared Code area a simple utility that allows you to…

When I was growing up, my mother would usually bake a ham for Christmas dinner.  She would always cut a slice off the side before putting it in the pan to cook.  One day I asked her why she did this and she replied that her mother always did it that way.  Now, I've never been the type of person who easily goes along with the "because we've always done it that way" kind of answer, so I asked my grandmother the same question…

As a Marketing Communications professional, I am always looking for creative ways to communicate with our current and potential customers. Over the last 13 years that I have been in this profession, I have seen many methods and vehicles used by Cadence and various other companies to reach out to external and internal audiences. I must say that some of the things I have seen have been pretty creative and unique. Last year…

Allow me to make a brief digression from EDA technology blogging to give you all a peak at what goes on inside of Cadence.  Specifically, last Thursday May 21 here at the Cadence San Jose campus we had a welcome break in our daily routines for a good cause -- the annual "Stars & Strikes" charity festival.  Let me explain: each year, Cadence offices around the world adopt a single, local charity to be the focus…

Imagine Team Specman's surprise when we came across this article on Slashdot about "the new E text editor":
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/24/172202

This was the first we've heard of this product, and we're curious to find out how the author came up with the name "E".  Anyone, anyone ....?

Regardless, since Cadence in general, and Specman and Incisive Enterprise Simulator-XL

Have you ever found yourself working with a massive schematic having to constantly zoom and pan around to find the block you're looking for (since they all look alike from high altitude)?  Then you descend into the block only to find that the sub-block you really wanted is somewhere else?  Well, pop back up and start over again...

Have you ever run a simulation which finds a problem with transistor I44.I23.I0.I25.NM2?  Again…

CDNLive! in Munich had it all - stimulating customer papers, demonstrations of new Cadence solutions, lots of lively technical interaction, even dancers in the exhibition hall and a funk band at the evening party. Given customer travel restrictions, there were fewer attendees from the more distant areas of Europe, but many sessions were packed and the common areas were busy. I attended most of the sessions in the Functional…

[Team Specman welcomes guest blogger Vitaly Lagoon, an Architect in the Generation Technology R&D group]

Consider the case where you have a generatable variable "x" taking random values from [0..99], i.e. all values are declared equal from the generation point of view.  However, imagine that from a verification perspective you are most interested in checking the extreme cases x==0 and x==99, as well…

Back on March 19 here in Silicon Valley, verification guru Brian Bailey gave a great talk at DVClub entitled "Is it time to declare verification war?". Brian had some interesting insights as usual, prompting me to start to write a blog post about it. However, some business and personal events intervened, and in the interim Brian scheduled an encore performance of his talk at the Boston area DVClub meeting this…

Do you remember the first time you used a browser with tabs?  All of a sudden, there you were...surfing two, three, four websites at once in the same window.  Yee-haw!  Life is good.  Well, now you can do the same thing in Virtuoso.  Okay, so you can't put YouTube in one tab and your schematic in another (yet), but you can easily have multiple tabs with schematics, layouts, symbols, etc. all in the same window. 

No more minimizing…