Cadence expands verification IP offerings

Cadence this morning announced a substantial expansion to its portfolio of silicon verification IP, adding 23 new VIP packages under the Incisive verification umbrella. The VIP, acquired under exclusive license agreements from smaller IP vendors Yogitech SpA, IntelliProp Inc., and HDL Design House, will now be available solely through Cadence.

The range of VIP is considerable, spanning both internal interconnect architectural elements such as AMBA APB and the OCP wrapper and external I/O standards, including many high-speed serial I/O systems. Cadence has folded all of these VIP packages into its Open Verification Methodology flow, so that Cadence’s automation tools for test generation and coverage metrics work with the new pieces.

As with any IP, there is always the question of quality. Cadence director of product marketing Dave Tokic said that the company had assured itself of the accuracy and completeness of these new packages through a multi-stage process. First, he said, Cadence had been involved in engineer-to-engineer contact with the developers in each of the three source companies during the development of the VIP. Second, Cadence had applied internal regression suites to the packages. And third, each has been in the hands of early customers, from whom Cadence has received feedback from actual user experience.

This is still no guarantee of perfection, Tokic admits. Since many of the organizations that supervise the standards in question do not have formal certification procedures for implementations, let alone for verification IP, there is no way to make VIP traceable back to an authoritative body of data. Even the standards documents—often dwarfing War and Peace in scope—cannot be definitive, as they are famously subject to interpretation. So for now, that leaves the correctness of VIP as a best-effort issue.

Ideally, there would at least be a way to link VIP results with plugfest and interoperability test results, so that the VIP could be compared against reality and continually improved. Today this must come from the experience of users, fed back through Cadence’s support organization. In the future, Tokic said, Cadence is investigating more direct links. In cooperation with the interoperability testing lab at the University of New Hampshire and with various standards organizations, Cadence is exploring ways of translating physical interoperability test back into VIP to at least increase the probability that an interface that clears verification will work in the real world. It’s no small challenge.