Cool Verification

Just wanted to point out to those of you reading via email or RSS feeds that there have been some interesting comments on my Goering on Mentor/Cadence VMM Support post from Steven Bailey (Mentor Graphics), Shalom Bresticker (Intel), David Robinson (Verilab), and Daniel Preda (NoBug).  Also, I received at least one private email chiding me for not including an originally planned reference to 1984 , which I read last month while on vacation (see also this exchange between Gabe Moretti and Grant Martin). 

As always, keep those comments and emails coming!

Wow... I guess you learn something new every day.  Richard Goering over at SCDSource has just written up a great article on the fact that both Mentor and Cadence now support the VMM.  When I wrote about this last week I'd only heard about the Mentor support.  One of the best parts of the article is Goering's description of a discussion he had with Karen Bartleson of Synopsys:

Bartleson said, however, that Synopsys has no intent to support OVM. "Our goal is to support the Accellera [VIP] standard, so we get some unification. For us to support OVM would mean more confusion in the industry."

So why is Mentor's support for VMM a good thing for interoperability, while Synopsys support for OVM would sow confusion? "Because VMM has been out there for two to three years in production and OVM was only recently introduced," Bartleson said. "If Mentor supports a more widely accepted, de facto standard, that's good for the industry. If Synopsys supports OVM, which is a new and different implementation, it will fragment things more."

A little birdie just gave me a call letting me know that Mentor has released a customized version of the VMM that runs on Questa.  I have not had time to dive in yet, but the associated PDF file that comes with the release takes great pains to describe how the VMM is not compliant with the SystemVerilog spec and why the OVM is better than the "legacy" VMM.  Check out Karen Bartleson's blog for a reaction from Synopsys where she says, "I’d venture to say that despite all the posturing, Mentor’s support of VMM demonstrates the solidity and broad industry acceptance of VMM."

Regardless of the marketing BS from both sides, I'm happy to see a simulator vendor supporting both methodologies, and I hope to see similar moves by Synopsys and Cadence in the near future.

This is a bit of old news but I've been on and off vacation for the last month and haven't had a chance to post for awhile.  Cadence now has a blog online on the new Cadence online community website.  For better or for worse they've chosen to create a group blog (though thankfully you can select a category of posts to view, such as Functional Verification).  My first impression? 

There are eight posts up in the Functional Verification category.  Only two of the posts are written by people without "Marketing" in their title (those would be posts written by Mike Stellfox and Jason Andrews).  It's not that I don't think the marketing guys like Adam, Joe, and Tom have anything interesting to say, it's just that I immediately have to treat what they write about the products they market with more suspicion than I would from people on the engineering side.  For that reason, I'd rather see the marketing message kept separate from the technical message. For example, I'd much rather see the marketing guys write a separate blog on their experiences marketing a verification library.  Plus, I want to hear more about the nitty-gritty techncial details of the OVM, not just why everyone loves it so much!