Thought Leadership

Part 10: The 2014 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study

ASIC/IC Language and Library Adoption Trends

This blog is a continuation of a series of blogs related to the 2014 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study (click here).  In my previous blog (click here), I presented our study findings on various verification technology adoption trends. In this blog, I focus on language and library adoption trends.

As previously noted, the reason some of the results sum to more than 100 percent is that some projects are using multiple languages; thus, individual projects can have multiple answers.

Figure 1 shows the adoption trends for languages used to create RTL designs. Essentially, the adoption rates for all languages used to create RTL designs is projected to be either declining or flat over the next year, with the exception of SystemVerilog.

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Figure 1. ASIC/IC Languages Used for RTL Design

Figure 2 shows the adoption trends for languages used to create ASIC/IC testbenches. Essentially, the adoption rates for all languages used to create testbenches are either declining or flat, with the exception of SystemVerilog. Nonetheless, the data suggest that SystemVerilog adoption is starting to saturate or level off at about 75 percent.

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Figure 2. ASIC/IC Languages Used for  Verification (Testbenches)

Figure 3 shows the adoption trends for various ASIC/IC testbench methodologies built using class libraries.

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Figure 3. ASIC/IC Methodologies and Testbench Base-Class Libraries

Here we see a decline in adoption of all methodologies and class libraries with the exception of Accellera’s UVM3, whose adoption increased by 56 percent between 2012 and 2014. Furthermore, our study revealed that UVM is projected to grow an additional 13 percent within the next year.

Figure 4 shows the ASIC/IC industry adoption trends for various assertion languages, and again, SystemVerilog Assertions seems to have saturated or leveled off.

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Figure 4. ASIC/IC Assertion Language Adoption

In my next blog (click here) I plan to present the ASIC/IC design and verification power trends.

Quick links to the 2014 Wilson Research Group Study results

Harry Foster

Harry Foster is Chief Scientist Verification for the Design Verification Technology Division of Mentor, A Siemens Business; and is the Co-Founder and Executive Editor for the Verification Academy. In addition, Harry is serving as the 2021 Design Automation Conference General Chair. He holds multiple patents in verification and has co-authored six books on verification. Harry was the 2006 recipient of the Accellera Technical Excellence Award for his contributions to developing industry standards, and was the original creator of the Accellera Open Verification Library (OVL) standard.

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2 thoughts about “Part 10: The 2014 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study
  • Hi Harry,

    Do you have data on what Verification methodology is used in regards to the design size.

    It would be interesting to see what design size the UVM adoption drops off at.

    I would venture to guess the smaller designs haven’t adopted UVM yet.

    Any thoughts?

    • Hi Eric,

      Actually, I have done deeper analysis on this and I found that for projects working on designs less than 5M gates, there was 64% industry adoption of UVM. For projects working on designs between 5M-80M gates, there is 82% industry adoption. And for projects working on designs greater than 80M gates, there is 74% industry adoption. The data suggest that UVM is now mainstream.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com/verificationhorizons/2015/07/27/part-10-the-2014-wilson-research-group-functional-verification-study/