OVM/UVM @DAC: The Dog That Didn’t Bark

In the classic Sherlock Holmes story, “Silver Blaze,” Holmes realizes that the family dog didn’t bark when the suspect entered the house to commit the crime. This leads Holmes to deduce that the suspect was familiar to the dog and, from there, he of course unravels the rest of the mystery (which I won’t spoil for you). Since then, “the dog that didn’t bark” has been used to denote something seemingly innocuous that reveals a lot more under the surface.

I was reminded of “the dog that didn’t bark” this week at DAC. I did a number of presentations on OVM and UVM in the OVMWorld booth and participated in a panel discussion on UVM at the Accellera breakfast on Tuesday. It was great to see the amount of interest shown by the audiences at all of these events. As you may know, Accellera chose OVM as the basis for UVM, and a lot of the discussion was on where we go from here. One question that kept coming up was whether Mentor and Cadence would continue development of OVM, now that UVM is coming closer to reality. The implication clearly was that it would somehow be a bad thing if we did, although I’m not sure exactly why. Our answer was that Mentor will continue supporting OVM as long as our customers are using it (which could be for some time given how long it sometimes takes for standards to come to fruition), but that we would put our energy into developing new functionality in UVM. It didn’t occur to me until later that there was a dog that didn’t bark at DAC.

The question that I never heard asked nor answered, especially at the Accellera breakfast, is this. If everyone is so concerned that continuing OVM development outside of UVM is somehow a bad thing, will Synopsys show a similar commitment to the success of UVM by suspending any further VMM development? After all, if further OVM development will somehow deter adoption of UVM, further VMM development would as well. So I think Synopsys should make the same commitment to the success of UVM that Mentor and Cadence have.