=Adam Sherilog
Cadence

I’ll echo some of Dennis’ comments — the Accellera VIP TSC is making steady progress towards methodology interoperability and ultimately what verification teams tell me they want – a single industry standard.

In the meantime, verification teams still need to get chips out and methodology can play a big role in improving their productivity. So as Synopsys supports the Accellera effort, it also continues to invest R&D bandwidth in VMM with new methodology applications, extensions to low power, updated libraries, etc.

-tom

Perhaps the Accellera Verification IP Technical Subcommittee’s work is more of a secret to you and possibly others. Progress is being made. So I would not despair.

And, as I recall from the last Accellera VIP TSC meeting, there is a pending agenda item to discuss an informational TSC meeting at the up coming DAC to discuss the details of the work. We will have Accellera alert you to this so you and your readers can attend.

As good progress is being made in “bridging the two environments” as you put it, this will address fundamental issues to adopt evolving technology. Namely, Newton’s First Law that a body at rest tends to stay at rest is addressed to allow efficient interaction between the “two environments” to promote reuse in the verification community of current and past work as the standards teams are on their Newtonian convergence path to offer a more unifying solution.

Lastly, I think you pin too much hope for a methodology to cure all verification issues alone. IMHO it will not do this. What it will do is set the stage for further fundamental work/research that needs to be applied on top of these methodologies to address those difficult verification challenges.

At Mentor we can already see the algorithmic inventions accrue to our verification solution within the context of OVM while simplifying adoption by preserving historical investments.

-Dennis

You say there has been little progress in bridging the VMM and OVM… That’s certainly not the case. The Accellera VIP TSC, of which I am a member, has made great progress in this area. Even outside of the standardization effort, Mentor and Cadence released VMM/OVM interoperability libraries back in December.

As a side note, back in the fall, I gave a worldwide seminar series on the similarities and differences between certain aspects of the VMM and OVM… The information is out there, you just need to know who to ask.

JL

The verification community is not ready yet for a methodology war. The pain level that the average verification team feels has not driven them to seek a methodology. Also, IP vendors have not been driven to produce verification IP for their IP cores.

As for managing complexity, we should learn what the software industry learned years ago. Things like interface versus implementation, data abstraction, data duplication is evil, and minimizing “if” tests, just to name a few.

In my opinion, the VMM and OVM and not good examples of these “lessons learned”.

Now as full disclosure, I have co-written a tiny open source verification framework that runs on 5 simulators and is in C++ and SystemVerilog. Also, I have co-written two books on verification that attempt to bridge the software versus verification engineer gap.

Mike