Accellera Approves UVM 1.2
Accellera has announced the completion of a multi-year effort to update its latest edition of the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM). In completing this effort, the UVM 1.2 Class Reference Document was approved as an Accellera standard and the UVM Working Group has supplied an accompanying open-source reference implementation. Questa supports UVM 1.2.
In addition to the resources you can download from Accellera, additional information on UVM 1.2 can be found at the Verification Academy. HTML documentation can easily be found at the Verification Academy too.
If you are a user of UVM 1.1 and have not been part of the UVM 1.2 development effort, you should know your peers have been busy the past few years since the stabilization and completion of UVM 1.1 to drive global adoption of UVM and to add, enhance and extend UVM. In UVM 1.2 Messaging is now object-oriented, Sequences can automatically raise and drop objects, the register layer can now control transaction order within bursts and numerous bugs in UVM 1.1 have been fixed to improve quality.
Backward Incompatibility
All these changes come with a cost to the current UVM 1.1 user community. When Accellera announced UVM 1.2 availability, it also disclosed some of the new features introduce backward incompatibility. To reduce those issues, Accellera is making release notes and a one way conversion script part of the UVM 1.2 kit to ease the migration path forward.
If you follow the Verification Academy Cookbook rules, you will probably not see any impact from the backward compatibility issues. And if you control your total verification environment, you will probably find it simpler to migrate forward as well. Those who depend on outside resources will need to make sure those resources (like Verification IP) migrate forward to UVM 1.2 so you can migrate forward to UVM 1.2. Mixing UVM 1.1 and UVM 1.2 was not considered by the Accellera UVM Working Group and is fraught with unknown issues. We consider the migration an all or nothing proposition. If you have multi-division, multi-company projects underway, it would be prudent to plan you move to UVM 1.2 with care at the conclusion of projects and when all suppliers and participating teams can migrate to UVM 1.2.
Public Review Period
Accellera seeks your input and feedback on UVM 1.2. To support this, a public review forum on the Accellera website has been established to allow users to catalog issues, ask questions and generally offer feedback to help improve UVM 1.2 quality.
The public review process will end on October 1, 2014. We encourage users to take the time now to test UVM 1.2 in their own environments and share their feedback to expidite the migration to UVM 1.2.
Path to IEEE
Public feedback will be taken into account along with further Accellera member testing to update UVM 1.2 prior to a committed hand-off to the IEEE for further standardization there later this year. As this path unfolds, I will share updates on the standardization effort in the IEEE.
Verification Academy DAC 2014 UVM 1.2 Presentation
You will find many resources around the world on UVM 1.2. At DAC 2014, the Verification Academy booth sponsored a session on UVM 1.2 titled “UVM: What’s New, What’s Next, and Why You Care.” If you did not attend DAC, you can still download the presentation and watch a video replay of it if you are a Verification Academy “full access” member (free registration required; restrictions apply).
The presentation by Tom Fitzpatrick goes into detail on the UVM 1.2 topic. Importantly in Tom’s presentation is a discussion about what you should care about today. You may find that software is a big issue and that his thesis challenges one to ask if UVM 1.2 is stuck in the past rather than addressing what should be addressed next. I invite you to download the presentation and watch the video and share with me your thoughts. What do you think?
