Articles

March 31st, 2022

AMIQ EDA Adds Support for Visual Studio Code to DVT IDE Family

The product enables engineers to inspect a project through diagrams. Designers can use HDL diagrams such as schematic, state machine, and flow diagrams. Verification engineers can use UML diagrams such as inheritance and collaboration diagrams. Diagrams are hyperlinked and synchronized with the source code and can be saved for documentation purposes.

March 30th, 2022

Ensuring Correctness and Quality of RISC-V Testbenches

Verissimo found many dozens of issues in the testbench code. The Verification Task Group had developed extensive coding guidelines for SystemVerilog and UVM, but they had not previously had an automated way to check them. Unsurprisingly, there were some violations.

February 21st, 2022

Automated Documentation of Space-Borne FPGA Designs

Documentation turned out to be a big challenge. Given that we’re developing a whole new type of application, our design is quite novel, and it evolved a lot over the course of the project as we learned new things and added more functionality. Every time this happened, it was vital that the design documentation be updated correctly to match the design changes. Of course, when a module changes, designers of the adjoining modules need to know.

December 2nd, 2021

Continuous Integration of RISC-V Testbenches

We have fixed many dozens of issues reported by Verissimo. Some were violations of our SystemVerilog/UVM coding guidelines that we previously had no automated way to detect, and some were due to rules we had not considered before. I especially like the rules that warn us about constructs that may work inconsistently on different simulators or that are not even supported on all simulators. It is important for our code to be vendor-neutral and portable.

October 7th, 2021

Delivering Three Key Aspects of IP Quality

There are three main requirements to IP quality. The most obvious is functional correctness, another is IP robustness, and last but not least, IP maintainability. AMIQ EDA has products that help you meet such requirements.

September 13th, 2021

Continuous Integration of UVM Testbenches

The concept is simple: all code changes from all developers are merged back into the main development stream frequently, perhaps as often as every few hours. AMIQ EDA has been running CI checks on the Github repository of the UVM reference implementation for years.

June 30th, 2021

What’s New with UVM and UVM Checking?

The level of checking that Verissimo provides helps IEEE create a better reference implementation library and helps users switching versions. Verification engineers clearly see the value in being able to check whether existing testbenches will work with the latest revision to the standard.

June 22nd, 2021

11 Myths About Integrated Development Environments

IDEs were introduced to improve the efficiency and accuracy of writing and maintaining code, providing easier file navigation, hierarchical views of the project codebase, etc. However, myths have arisen about IDEs, and this article looks to clear the air.

March 29th, 2021

Why Would Anyone Perform Non-Standard Language Checks?

Relying on non-standard constructs can trap users with one vendor and make it expensive to switch to another.

December 21st, 2020

Does IDE Stand for Integrated Design Environment?

Examples of design visualization include the connections of a signal or instance, or connections between instances