Hardware Verification With SystemVerilog: An Object-oriented Framework

This is the second of our books designed to help the professional verifier manage complexity. This time, we have responded to a growing interest not only in object-oriented programming but also in SystemVerilog. The writing of this second handbook has been just another step in an ongoing masochistic endeavor to make your professional lives as painfree as possible. The authors are not special people. We have worked in several companies, large and small, made mistakes, and generally muddled through our work. There are many people in the industry who are smarter than we are, and many coworkers who are more experienced. However, we have a strong desire to help. We have been in the lab when we bring up the chips fresh from the fab, with customers and sales breathing down our necks. We’ve been through software 1 bring-up and worked on drivers that had to work around bugs in production chips. What we feel makes us unique is our combined broad experience from both the software and hardware worlds. Mike has over 20 years of experience from the software world that he applies in this book to hardware verification. Robert has over 12 years of experience with hardware verification, with a focus on environments and methodology.

Verification is increasingly complex, and SystemVerilog is one of the languages that the verification community is turning to. However, no language by itself can guarantee success without proper techniques. Object-oriented programming (OOP), with its focus on managing complexity, is ideally suited to this task.

With this handbook―the first to focus on applying OOP to SystemVerilog―we’ll show how to manage complexity by using layers of abstraction and base classes. By adapting these techniques, you will write more "reasonable" code, and build efficient and reusable verification components.

Both a learning tool and a reference, this handbook contains hundreds of real-world code snippets and three professional verification-system examples. You can copy and paste from these examples, which are all based on an open-source, vendor-neutral framework (with code freely available at www.trusster.com).

Learn about OOP techniques such as these:

• Creating classes―code interfaces, factory functions, reuse
• Connecting classes―pointers, inheritance, channels
• Using "correct by construction"―strong typing, base classes
• Packaging it up―singletons, static methods, packages

This handbook guides the user in applying OOP techniques for verification. Mike and Robert have captured their years of experience in a clear and easy-to-read handbook. The examples are complete, and the code is available for you to get started right away. Highly recommended.

Thomas D. Tessier, President,
t2design, Inc.

This handbook contains a lot of useful advice for any verification engineer wanting to create a class-based testbench, regardless of the framework/methodology used. I recommend Hardware Verification with SystemVerilog to anyone who wants a greater understanding of how best to use OOP with SystemVerilog.

Dr. David Long,Senior Consultant,
Doulos

This is a fantastic book that not only shows how to use SystemVerilog and Object-Oriented Programming for verification, but also provides practical examples that are open source!

Stephanie Waters, Field Applications Engineer,
Cadence Design Systems

I have been using SystemVerilog for two years in my research, and this is by far the best book I have found about how to achieve professional grade verification. I will apply these techniques on my future projects.

Dr. Oswaldo Cadenas, Lecturer, Electronic Engineering,
University of Reading, U.K.