#specification automation

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Specification Automation Tools Enabling Faster Completion of Chip Development Projects

The challenge before chip designers nowadays is to build high quality integrated circuit chips in a fast manner. But due to their small size and these having in them millions of components, designing chips is a complex and time consuming affair which can lead to delayed completion of chip development projects and overshooting of budget for such projects. Consequently, a chip development firm would lose business to its rival firms. This would also affect its profits.

To avoid such undesired outcomes, chip design companies need to adopt innovative and technologically advanced specification automation tools offered by a renowned electronic design automation solution provider. These tools enable the chip designers to automatically create a chip design verification code from the specification itself. So they can perform their chip design and verification tasks efficiently, leading to faster completion of projects. Also the projects can be managed within the allocated budget. So the concerned companies can deliver quality and bug free products to their clients timely and earn profits as projected. They can thus retain their clients and can well achieve their organizational goals.

Such a tool enables chip designers to create a simple yet powerful specification in popular editors used for documenting registers like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel or plain text. As the specification is content aware, any conflict arising in a register address is checked and highlighted in the specification itself. Any change made in the specification gets automatically translated into the chip design verification code.

This tool can be easily used by the chip designers. Powerful code generation through it helps to keep the specification synchronized with the product development. Register data can be stored in the native editor format. The tool provides complete register data portability with the design teams. It is also extensible.

These are some of the benefits provided by this tool.

It lets chip designers to automatically verify all addressable registers in the chip design for ensuring the generated register code is correct.

With it, synthesizable code for the registers for design teams can be created. So they can be kept synchronized with the product requirements.

Its use leads to faster and more accurate development of a device driver, firmware and application software.

The tool helps to remove any errors between communication held between various functional teams working over a common chip development project.

It enables chip designers to automatically create product documentation for customers and technical publications.

The tool helps to improve performance and productivity of chip designers and lets them deliver quality results.

It supports various teams like design, architecture, verification, application software besides other teams working over a chip development work.

By using such a technologically advanced Specification Automation tool, chip designers can reduce complexity in their chip design and verification tasks and can perform them more efficiently. They can identify errors in a chip design and remove them at the earliest. So their passage into the manufacturing stage can be avoided where removing them would prove to be more costly and time consuming. Thus a chip development project can be completed faster and managed within the allocated budget. So the concerned chip development firm can deliver high quality and bug free products to its clients timely and can earn profits as projected. It would be able to retain its clients and can gain a competitive edge over its rival firms. Also, it can well achieve its organizational goals. The chip development firms should seriously consider investing in this tool as it is going to play a crucial role in their success.

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Chip Designers Need To Build Chip Designs Fast And As Per Hardware Specification

Integrated circuit chips are nowadays being increasingly employed for imparting functionality to cell phones, computers, medical systems besides other devices. Their ability to operate at extreme temperatures, small size, less consumption of electricity, durability and less costs make these chips ideal for use in such devices. As a chip can contain millions of components, designing it becomes quite a complex and time consuming affair. Chip designers need to design quality and high performance chips fast and within budget. So the concerned chip development firms can deliver them timely to their clients and earn the projected profits.

How tools help in the chip design process: In order to create chip designs fast and efficiently, chip designers need to adopt innovative and technologically advanced tools offered by a professional electronic design automation solution provider. These tools support the latest chip design and verification methodologies, techniques and practices. Using them would enable the chip designers to reduce complexity in their chip design and verification tasks. They have to build quality, high performance and bug free chips as per the provided hardware specification and clients’ requirements. The physical components of a chip are registers and memory map elements. These are collectively referred to as a chip’s hardware. These components impart functionality to a given device and function when electrical signals pass through them.

By using these tools, chip designers can not only perform their chip design tasks fast, but also can perform a comprehensive and fast verification of the chips designed by them. The tools enable them to generate test cases from the register specification and use them for verifying and validating the chip designs. So the chip designers can make out if the created chip designs have been built as per the specification and if they are fulfilling the specific requirements of clients. Also, they can track any errors remaining in the chip designs. So these can be rectified at the design stage itself. This helps to avoid the passage of errors into the manufacturing stage where removing them would become more costly and time consuming.

Benefits of tools to chip designers: The use of these tools grants various benefits to the chip designers. With them, they can perform their chip design and verification tasks fast and efficiently. These also enable fast development of firmware and application software. The tools help to improve communication among design, diagnosis, architecture and other teams working over a common chip development project and keeps them updated over current developments taking place in a chip design and development project. The tools also help to create documentation for customers and technical publications.

By using these tools which support the use of latest chip design and verification practices, techniques and methodologies, chip development firms can build high quality and bug free chip designs as per the Hardware Specification and clients’ requirements and in a fast manner. They can complete their projects within the allocated time and budget. So the firms can deliver quality products to their clients on time and earn profits as projected. They can gain a competitive edge over rival chip development firms. The firms can also well achieve their specific business goals. Investing in these tools would be in the best of interest of chip development firms as these would help to enhance their productivity and profitability. They would thus be playing a crucial role in their success.

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What Do You Get With Universal Verification Methodology?

As virtual structures develop in complexity, Universal Verification Methodology gets regularly extra crucial. While in the early beginning...

UVM is one of the methodologies that were comprised of the need to automate verification. The Universal Verification Methodology is a set of API and verified verification suggestions written for System Verilog that help an engineer to create a green verification environment. It’s an open-source standard maintained by using Accellera and may be freely acquired of their website.

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What You Get With Universal Verification Methodology?

Universal Verification Methodology is a trendy verification methodology that’s getting an increasing number of recognition and adoption in verification enterprise, the methodology is presentl…

UVM consists of a defined methodology in phrases of architecting test benches and check cases and additionally comes with a library of classes that allows in building green restricted random test benches without difficulty.

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Using Hardware-Assisted Technology to Speed Up the soc Verification Process

Chip designers are under constant pressure to enhance the performance of chips while simultaneously minimizing cost. One way to attain this is by speeding up the verification method - as verification constitutes more than 70% of the complete chip design process, embracing technologies and tools that result in earlier verification is the need of the hour.

The Need for Hardware-Assisted Verification Models

In order to meet the demands of abridged development cycles, it is essential for software and hardware on a chip to be verified at the same time. Since software development cannot wait till the hardware features of the chip are developed, design teams require to adopt a fail-safe way to verify chips will work as future as soon as the embedded software runs. This requires the design team to generate a working prototype for software development as early as possible, and much before the end of the hardware design cycle.

Hardware Assisted Technology

The process of soc verification has come a long way. For many digital design engineers, there are some convincing reasons for performing hardware-assisted verification. Since performance is the key, it is important for soc verification systems to deliver the highest performance models and atmosphere for soc verification.

Hardware acceleration methods help overcomes the challenge of meeting the performance necessities for soc verification.

• With hardware-assisted soc verification, you do not have to write the test bench or agonize about how the interfaces will be exercised.

• For example, to check if a peripheral device works as intended, you can take a physical or virtual secondary device, connect it up to the design and then use the device driver for the controller to perform functions to see if the interface works properly.

• Hardware accelerators allow you to use components like FPGA to build the hardware platform.

• Using embedded test benches, you can perform Hardware-assisted verification and virtualizes the environment to speed up the soc and FPGA verification process.

With increases in size and complexity of today's soc devices, verification requires you to accomplish massive tests spanning billions of cycles. Using advanced verification technologies like hardware-assisted emulation systems, you can accelerate the verification process and deliver the highest performance.

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The Significance of Universal Verification Methodology | Agnisys

Universal Verification Methodology is getting popular. It consists of a clear methodology in terms of designing test cases, test benches and library of classes, it helps in building well-organized and constrained random test benches that help verify the IP/SoC.

In an effort to reduce the time-to-market and improve productivity the EDA and Semiconductor industry jointly created a framework under Accellera. This UVM framework provides a collection of useful classes. The test bench blocks are ready to use without the necessity of writing the test bench from scratch.

Evolved verification methodologies like UVM enable high efficiency and re-usable structure. However, many product groups do not take such productiveness and benefits considering they underestimate the ramp-up time required to introduce Universal Verification Methodology.

Agnisys offers DVinsight by bringing together the best that modern technology has to offer. It is a smart editor for working on the SV/UVM code base. There are a lot of un-said rules that UVM code must comply with otherwise it generates errors at compile or run time that are very hard to debug. DVinsght ensure that such errors are not created in the first place. Its correct-by-construction approach helps the team downstream to save time.