Date: 20th Dec 2010

Mentor Graphics suggests smart verification methodologies for VLSI engineers

In VLSI domain, RTL and other pre-GDS verification job is a no thanks job and sometimes gets monotonous but the smart engineers can apply skills to improve verification and make the job more interesting. Mentor Graphics is making strong effort to improve verification process. It has tried this by providing tools and expertise to Infineon to improve Infineon's verification productivity and effectiveness by assessing the status quo and by jointly establishing improved SystemVerilog (SV) methodologies. The new tool doing some magic is Mentor Graphics Questa functional verification platform. The tools and the smart verification methodology has added some smartness to the verification world.

The suggestion for the verification community from Mentor Graphics include:

Creating a verification architecture document describing overall strategy defining the general methods, layers, phases, components, libraries, scripts, databases, tools, and decisions that would be used throughout the verification effort

Build reusable verification components for all the design under test (DUT) interfaces
Incorporate non-intrusive UPF-based power-aware logic in the verification environment
Incorporate automatic formal technology to ease the process of identifying the type of bugs found through formal techniques.

Incorporate verification metrics such as assertion density, functional coverage, bug tracking, test ranking, test sorting, and test merging to provide useful information about the verification status, and how to monitor real verification progress in terms of the effectiveness of each test.

Build a series of pseudo-random test case sequences through a combination of constraints and object oriented programming (OOP) extensions within an OVM testbench, to find bugs and exhaustively verify the functionality of the DUT

This is what leading semiconductor vendor Infineon has applied in its VLSI design techniques shared from Mentor Graphics according to the release.