Design

Aldec and SynthWorks deliver Randomization and Functional Coverage Capabilities to VHDL Designers with OS-VVM

10th January 2012
ES Admin
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Aldec, Inc., in collaboration with SynthWorks Design Inc., today announces the availability of Open Source - VHDL Verification Methodology (OS-VVM™), underscoring the partnership’s commitment to provide continued support to the VHDL design community.
OS-VVM delivers advanced verification test methodologies, including Constrained and Coverage-driven Randomization, as well as Functional Coverage, and provides advanced features to engineers designing ASICS and FPGA-based applications using VHDL.

Igor Tsapenko, Aldec Director of Engineering, comments: “Hardware description languages such as VHDL and Verilog have provided electronics design engineers the ability to create complex digital projects. However, the challenge that many designers face is how to support system-level design requirements. In recent years, new language standards such as SystemVerilog and SystemC have emerged to aid in performing advanced system verification tasks, leaving VHDL designers with the dilemma of learning a new language.”

Jim Lewis, Director of VHDL Training at SynthWorks, adds: “The unique feature of OS-VVM is the ability to use live results of Functional Coverage to control randomization of stimulus. This ‘intelligent coverage’ helps minimize the number of test cases that need to be generated to achieve complete coverage - resulting in fewer simulation cycles and a higher velocity of verification.”

The benefits of OS-VVM include:
- It provides access to advanced randomization and functional coverage capabilities (previously available only within system-level methodologies) that can be used in any testbench;
- Rather than using a constraint solver, balance in the randomization is achieved by interacting with the functional coverage model, resulting in fewer cycles;
- The initial randomization is refined by using procedural code which can easily mix directed, algorithmic, file based methods and additional randomization; and
- Straightforward usage model, ensuring users are able to get up to speed quickly while retaining the freedom and flexibility to continue using their HDL of choice.

The latest versions of Aldec’s Active-HDL and Riviera-PRO EDA tools offer the advanced randomization and functional coverage capabilities provided by OS-VVM within the Options menu for VHDL-2008; i.e. no additional licenses are required.

SynthWorks, the maintainer of the OS-VVM packages, also offers in-depth training for OS-VVM and supplements with additional packages for creating scoreboards, memories, and abstracting interfaces.

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