CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

25 February 2009

Company News

OVM Extended to Efficiently Manage Coverage Metrics

Mentor Graphics and Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced they have extended the Open Verification Methodology (OVM) to include the Unified Coverage Database (UCDB) application program interface (API) and an XML interchange format. The availability of the UCDB API and complementary XML interchange format documentation will allow verification teams to manage coverage metrics in a multi-tool, multi-vendor verification environment, and represents a step toward a standardized approach to managing coverage metrics. Coverage metrics are used to quantify verification effectiveness and completeness, and to highlight areas of a design that require additional verification.

Coverage metrics come from numerous sources, including simulation, static design checking, functional formal verification, sequential equivalence checking and emulation. Each verification tool creates coverage metrics that may be discrete, overlapping, or subsets of one another. With the UCDB API and the XML interchange format, verification teams are given the building blocks to manage the enormous amount of information generated during the verification process in a consistent manner with greater flexibility, and to tailor data transfer and analysis capabilities best suited to their tool and verification environment.

The Mentor/Cadence® extension to OVM matches their recent donations to the Accellera Unified Coverage Interoperability Standards (UCIS) technical subcommittee. Documentation for both the UCDB API and XML interchange format is available in the Community Contributions area of OVM World (www.ovmworld.org) under the Apache 2.0 license in keeping with OVM license terms. By using the Apache 2.0 license for this functionality, the specifications are available to everyone in the OVM ecosystem, and the Accellera UCIS technical subcommittee can easily access the specifications and any enhancements as it completes the standardization task.

About the Open Verification Methodology

The Open Verification Methodology, based on IEEE Std. 1800™-2005 SystemVerilog standard, is the first open, language-interoperable, SystemVerilog verification methodology in the industry. It provides a methodology and accompanying library that allow users to create modular, reusable verification environments in which components communicate with each other via standard transaction-level modeling interfaces. It also enables intra- and inter-company reuse through a common methodology and classes for virtual sequences and block-to-system reuse, and full integration with other languages commonly used in production flows. The OVM and OVM World began in August 2007 as a joint effort by Cadence Design Systems and Mentor Graphics.

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