Thursday, June 16, 2011

Verification gets another buzzword - “ADS” thanks to Cadence

At DAC 2011, Cadence introduced yet-another 3-letter buzzword to the wonderful world of Verification – ADS: Assertion-Driven Simulation. Traditionally assertions have been monitors/passive elements, but some high-end formal verification groups have been using it to drive model checkers, random stimulus generators etc. CVC (www.cvcblr.com) has a long history with assertions and we saw this ADS model first with a start-up named Safelogic in Sweden, that got acquired by Jasper a while ago. Under the hood most of the formal tools could do this – be it CDN’s IFV, SNPS’s Magellan etc.

Jasper rolled out ActiveDesign in 2010 and TeamCVC spoke to the developers and blogged it at http://www.cvcblr.com/blog/?p=132

Recently Zocalo (www.zocalo-tech.com) announced VisualSVA product that enables capturing of SVA via a GUI and also provide debug traces

And now Cadence brings it even more closer – down to your Simvision window – with a push of an additional button in your favorite Waveform window you get stimulus, see: http://bit.ly/mo9kjl 

This is certainly encouraging and will propel the industry to increase the much needed assertion density among legacy & new RTL designs to improve the quality of designs.

From a language perspective SystemVerilog 2009 added checker..endchecker and rand variables inside. While the 2009 LRM limits the checker to be “monitors” alone, the recent discussions in the SV-AC IEEE extension groups proposals are emerging to make them “generate random stimulus” from checker blocks too. So stay tuned for more on ADS :-)

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