Early validation of RTL – with no Testbench!

 

Srinivasan Venkataramanan, CVC Pvt. Ltd.

Looks like Jasper DA (www.jasper-da.com) is on a mission to drive simulation a passé J On a more serious note, their recently announced ActiveDesign (TM) technology sounds pretty interesting for early RTL validation. Before I hear that “Aha..that’s my favourite LINTing”, hold on.. this is much more than that – one can see real waveforms– no testbench is ready yet, but the tool can create quality waveforms for you!

Sounds too good to be true, well their demo indeed shows a very representative real life design – AHB-lite to AXI bridge with 4 AHB-lite masters.

I had a chat with the ActiveDesign team recently to understand what goes “behind-the-scene” (Norris Ip, Holly Stump & Saptarshi all from Jasper). My main doubt on this “early RTL validation” was whether it can work for custom protocols and whether user needs to provide some assertions to get this working. These questions are relevant because we at CVC have prototyped similar stuff for standard protocols via our SVA/PSL based MIPs (Monitor IPs) and some commercially available tool features from other EDA vendors – it involves few hacks and scripting, but doable – if put in some hard work. It requires either an advanced SVA/PSL aware simulator or a model checker/formal tool.

Coming back to Jasper, the short & sweet answer is:

“No, user doesn’t have to create any assertions for getting this. The tool analyzes the RTL code and , based on a few user-interactions with the GUI, waveforms are created". And yes it does work for any design not just for standard protocols” As a side note the tool can create SVA code for the “behaviors/recipes” – more on it later.

The technology is built around Jasper’s popular and proven Visualize (TM) and recently announced “Behavioral Indexing (TM)”. More on the “behavioral indexing” in one of my next entries.

For now, if you are developing a fresh RTL and want to validate it without having to wait for RTL to finish, TB to be ready etc. look at ActiveDesign. Of-course I also highly recommend running LINT before you do that, though Jasper doesn’t have that in this platform. You may want to try some of the new linters such as Aldec’s ALINT, see: http://www.cvcblr.com/blog/?p=99 for a fresh look at Linters.