Hardware Verification with C++

So what makes a person write a book? Insanity is a definite probability.

Another possibility is a strong desire to help. We 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.

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

bring-up and worked on drivers that had to work around bugs, er, features,

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.

So what we bring to the task of funcTIonal verification is over three decades

of combined experience, from design, verification, software development,

and management. It is our experiences that speak in this handbook. It is our

desire that others might learn and benefit from these experiences.

We have had heated discussions over each line of code in this book and in

our open-source libraries. We rarely agree at first, but by having to argue our

cases we arrive at what we feel are smart, efficient, flexible, and simple

solutions. Most of these we have “borrowed” from the software industry but

have applied to the field of verification.

We believe that the verification industry can benefit from the lessons learned

from the software domain. By using the industry-standard C++ language, the

verification domain can adapt techniques and code from over twenty calendar

years of software effort, the scope of which is nothing short of stunning.

Many brilliant people have paved the way in the software field. Although the

field of verification is much younger, we could benefit greatly from listening,

learning, and adapting mature programming techniques to the production of

products of the highest quality.

So why did we include open-source software with the handbook? Open-source

software is a key to uniting and increasing the productivity of our industry.There is almost no successful closed-source (“hard macro”) intellectual

property (IP), for a good reason. Without the ability to look at the source

and edit as necessary, the task is much more difficult and the chances for

success are slim.

You can find the open-source software and the examples used in this

handbook on the accompanying CD. We’ve also included a simulator,

which can be used for 30 days. The installer should run automatically,

but in case it does not on your system, you can find the code at the top

level of the CD.

The writing of this handbook has been a great and interesting, if slightly

tiring, ride for us. We hope that the reading—and better yet, the application—

of the basic principles inside will be of value for you.