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IEEE 1801™-2013 Enters Pre-Publish Phase The completion and approval of electronic design automation standards has seemed to be the order of the day for several months now.  Added to this list is the IEEE Standards Association (SA) approval of their newly revised low power standard (IEEE 1801™-2013).  The IEEE SA’s Review Committee (RevCom) unanimously recommended approval and that was confirmed by … Read More

UPF, Erich Marschner, IEEE 1801, DVCon, RevCom, Low Power

Hi Everyone, Just wanted to let you all know that the new issue of Verification Horizons is now available. If you’re at DVCon this week, you can get a printed copy (and maybe get an author or two to sign it) at various places around the conference, especially at our tutorial on Thursday morning. If you’re not at the conference, you can get it online at the Verification Academy. Please be … Read More

Today at this week’s DVCon 2013 conference, the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) and Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera) have jointly announced the public availability of the IEEE 1800 SystemVerilog Language Reference Manual at no charge through the IEEE Get Program. As I posted a few weeks ago, the 1800-2012 is not a major revision of the standard, but does contain a few enhancements … Read More

Functional Verification, Accellera

Download the standard now – at no charge! The IEEE has published the latest update to the SystemVerilog standard.  And courtesy of Accellera, the standard is available for download without charge directly from the IEEE. The latest update to the SystemVerilog standard is now ready for download.  It joins other EDA standards, like SystemC in the IEEE Get™ program that grants public access to … Read More

UVM Cookbook, IEEE 1800, IEEE Get, Coverage Cookbook, UVM, SystemC

Learn about new standards, industry surveys and trends This year’s DVCon is set and if you have not yet registered, you can do it now – or just show up!  If you want to secure seating at some of the Monday tutorial events, I strongly encourage pre-registration to ensure you can secure a seat.  And if you just want to see the exhibits and chat with suppliers, that’s free. The IEEE low power format … Read More

IEEE 1801, Low Power, Harry Foster, Wally Rhines, UPF

The latest revision of the IEEE 1800-2012 SystemVerilog Language Reference Manual (LRM) is about to hit the presses; though I doubt people will be printing the 1300+ pages on their own from the soon to be readily available online version. Here’s a little background into what’s in all those pages. The first SystemVerilog LRM came from Accellera in 2002 as a set of extensions to the IEEE … Read More

functional coverage, Constrained Random Test, Verification

VHDL-2008 Explained Via 7 Course Modules For some time now a dedicated group of engineers have defined and standardized an important update to the VHDL standard.  Also know as IEEE Std. 1076™-2008, this update to VHDL took an interesting path to get to where it is today.  The VHDL standards team started the standards development work in the IEEE but sought additional input and standards project funding … Read More

ieee 1076, Verification Acdemy, iec, VHDL

IEEE Std. 1800™-2012 Officially Ratified The IEEE Standards Association (SA) Standards Board (SASB) officially approved the latest SystemVerilog revision, Draft 6, as an IEEE standard.  The SASB Review Committee (RevCom) agenda and the SASB agenda include review and formal approval of the latest work by the IEEE Computer Society Design Automation Standards Committee’s (DASC) SystemVerilog Working Group … Read More

Muttiple Inheritance, RevCom, Assertions, Tom Fitzpatrick, UVM, Ben Cohen, Soft Constraints, Hard Constraints, IEEE SASB, Stu Sutherland, DASC, DVCon

Verification Academy Adds Major New Technical Resource The Verification Academy adds another major methodology cookbook to focus on effective coverage adoption.  The Coverage Cookbook describes the different types of coverage that are available to track your verification process progress, how to create a functional coverage model from a specification, and provides examples to implement functional … Read More

OVM, UCDB, Coverage, Coverage Closure, Accellera, UCIS, Harry Foster, UVM, IEEE 1800, Coverage Cookbook, Verification Academy, functional coverage

Ready for 100 billion “things” connected by the Internet? The IEEE Standards Association (SA) Corporate Advisory Group (CAG) has been working to bring industry input into the standards development organization on the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) trend that will connect billions of devices with each other. As you can imagine, the impact this will have to the service structure down to the development … Read More

ARM TechCon, ARM, oneM2M, Internet of Things, IoT

Hi Everyone, Just wanted to let you know that the latest and greatest edition of Verification Horizons is now available. The articles in this issue all discuss how you can apply new techniques and technology to achieve greater verification productivity. And for you football (I mean “American football” as opposed to “soccer”) fans out there, be sure and check out the Editor’s … Read More

When it comes to formal methods, many engineers are skeptics. Perhaps this is due to value propositions that have been pitched over the years that have over-promised yet under-delivered in terms of results. Or perhaps it is due to the advanced skills that have traditionally been required to achieve predictable and reliable results. After all, historically this was the case—dating back to the mid-nineties … Read More

A new style takes center stage It was Fashion Week in Portland, Oregon in early October.  And while the thought of Portland and fashion might not be believable to many in the world, especially those who look to the design houses of Paris or Milan, it was.  What struck me was the blend of fashion with high tech this year.  Intel took the opportunity to roll out its fashion inspired campaign (dressing … Read More

UVM, UVM Cookbook, OVM, Verification, Verification Academy

At the 2012 Design Automation Conference, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at a workshop titled “Post-Silicon Debug: Technologies, Methodologies, and Best-Practices.” This workshop brought together a collection of experts from industry, academia, and EDA to discuss the emerging challenges and solutions associated with post-silicon validation. The speakers presented different instrumentation … Read More

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A system-level verification engineer once told me that his company consumes over 50% of its emulation capacity debugging failures. According to him there was just no way around consuming emulators while debugging their SoC design emulation runs. In fact when failures occur during emulation, verification engineers often turn to live debugging with JTAG interfaces to the Design Under Test. This enables … Read More

Functional Verification, Instant Replay, Emulation, Verification, Verification Academy, JTAG, SoC