CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

18 July 2008

Company News

Mentor Graphics Donates Unified Coverage Database (UCDB) to the Accellera Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard (UCIS) Technical Subcommittee

Mentor Graphics announced the donation of its Unified Coverage Database (UCDB) specification and application programming interface (API), which manages all coverage data from multiple tools, to Accellera’s Unified Coverage Database Interoperability (UCIS) Technical Subcommittee, the organization for electronic design industry standards.

“Mentor Graphics is pleased its UCDB has been selected by Accellera to promote further standardization in verification management,” said Dennis Brophy, Director of Strategic Business Development, Mentor Graphics. “This is the same API that is used in our Questa verification platform today and offers production-proven technology as the basis for standardization within Accellera.”

Coverage metrics are used to quantify verification effectiveness and to highlight verification shortcomings that require attention. Coverage metrics come from numerous sources, including simulation, static design checking, functional formal verification, sequential equivalence checking and emulation. Each verification tool generally creates one or more collection of coverage metrics that may be discrete, overlapping, or subsets of one another. One of the key roles of the verification team is to bring this voluminous information together and interpret it so the verification team can determine verification completeness.

“Managing verification information for verification closure is a major focus in the electronics industry, and we applaud Mentor’s timely donation to Accellera,” stated Shrenik Mehta, Accellera chairman. “Mentor’s unified coverage database specification and API improves the verification process, and the fact that this technology is actually proven through partner and customer usage makes this donation particularly valuable as an open standard.”

The Mentor Graphics UCDB donation includes the C language API header files and the UCDB API Reference and UCDB API User Guide documentation.

About Accellera’s Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard

The Accellera Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard (UCIS) Technical Subcommittee (TSC) was formed through active participation of the design community and EDA suppliers. The goals of the UCIS TSC are to identify interoperability opportunities between various coverage sources, define standard coverage models for commonly used metrics, design an interoperability standard that allows coverage data to be exchanged among EDA vendors’ tools and IC vendors’ environments, and encourage user and EDA technology advancement for the next generation of coverage solutions. UCIS is open to everyone without requiring non-disclosure agreements or proprietary licenses, and all parties are invited to participate in the development of the standard. For more information about the Accellera Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard, go to http://www.accellera.org/activities/ucis.

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