Breker’s Trek @DAC and CVC’s engagement so far..

Another piece partly covered in Cooley’s report, but for those interested in full details (more technical updates coming in soon)..

Here are my (and my team, who is looking at it closely during an eval) observations on Breker's Trek tool. What we really like about this tool is that it an add-on to any existing methodology/environment (atleast we look at Verilog, SystemVerilog, VMM & OVM for now). Their marketing is also quite good in saying we solve the last 20% of the problem (which usually is the pain-point) though it needs to be proven (our eval is still in early stage). The BNF syntax looks interesting and for the uninitiated it may take a while, but certainly no big deal. We can appreciate the value such a tool brings in for testcase generation. However they claim to be eliminating the need for complex checkers - this is something we are still wary about and would like to delve deep into during the eval. In our view the checker part is hard and will be hard even with Trek. Our view of this feature of Trek is it is an ability to correlate the testcase and coverage to the checking mechanism - hopefully at a higher level of abstraction. If this can be achieved we would be glad with that. The coverage results annotation and reachability analysis part is really promising as it presents the test-coverage at a higher level of abstraction than traditional SV. In SV world one needs to code the complex covergroups, code/generate tests, correlate them and then view lower level coverage data (GUI/HTML/TEXT) to extract same kind of information.

Thanks

Shalini, CVC Pvt Ltd