Go2UVM has a major update on the eve of DVCon USA 2017. We added several new features including:
- Simplified messaging via new macros
- Support for arbitrary signal access to enable force/deposit/release on DUT signals
- Waves2UVM – a handy way to convert timing diagrams to UVM tests
- Register layer app – the BIG one!
While UVM Register layer has been around for few years, an average UVM-aware engineer finds it hard to adopt quickly (compared to rest of UVM). This gets even more tough for RTL Designers looking to do some quick sanity tests on their RTL before handing it off to full-fledged DV teams. As part of our mission to “Go to UVM – the fastest way”, we have added a new app to assist in this process.
Generating UVM registers from an IP-XACT/SystemRDL/XML/YAML files has been around for many years. A limited edition of this capability exists as part of VerifWorks’s DVCreate-PSS tool as well.
However using the UVM register model to create quality tests requires more work form the user side. Part of the problem is to do with the various DUT protocols used to configure the registers as part of the designs. Go2uVM’s new register app targets exactly this problem, i.e. it builds on top of a generated UVM register model and makes it a push-button solution for simple designs to use register layer. When deployed correctly, this can lead to productive results in less than 30 minutes flat for an average RTL Designer (enabling him/her with many UVM capabilities). So how does it work? Below are the pieces needed to perform early register testing for a new RTL.
- Register spec (IP-XACT and the likes)
- Protocol specification to write and read from the registers
- Some use case scenarios
A first step would be to create a UVM register model from the IP-XACT through available tools. The second step involves writing a small BFM (Bus Functional Model) to capture bus write-read protocol. With Go2UVM’s latest register app, we pushed this to a SystemVerilog interface named g2u_reg_if. A skeleton code looks as below:
interface g2u_reg_if (input logic clk);
// Relevant signal declarations
task g2u_write (uvm_reg_addr_t wr_addr, uvm_reg_data_t wr_data);
// Actual protocol to write to RTL
endtask : g2u_writetask g2u_read (uvm_reg_addr_t rd_addr, output uvm_reg_data_t rd_data);
// Actual protocol to read from RTLendtask : g2u_read
endinterface : g2u_reg_if
Once a basic BFM inside a g2u_reg_if is created, our latest app does the remaining work and creates a thin UVM environment with:
- Register model instance, creation & build
- Built-in Go2UVM register agent (g2u_reg_agent) instance and connections
- Necessary UVM register adaptors (bus2reg() and reg2bus())
- A thin UVM driver-sequencer-agent-monitor hierarchy
For any new design with a different protocol, only the interface requires updates.Typical tests that are readily available with Go2UVM app includes:
- Hardware reset and post reset value checking
- Bit-bashing of all registers and fields (as defined in the IP-XACT spec for the given design)
- Register access policy checks
- Aliasing tests (On need basis)
A typical test using the Go2uMV register app looks like below:
We will soon be adding more examples including sample designs from OpenCores, typical protocols such as AHB-Lite, AXI, WishBone etc. to our GitHub repository. Meanwhile the latest release of Go2UVM is 2017.01 and is available under LGPL license from the link below:
We will be showing this in detail at DVCon USA 2017 as part of a UVM tutorial as well.
Let’s Go-to-UVM!
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