The best cooperative efforts in the EDA industry are guided by the collective input of users and technology providers. Those that aren’t tend to be dominated by one or two key players, making them somewhat less than truly cooperative. The Open Verification Methodology (OVM) World community is striving for the former path through its establishment of the OVM Advisory Group (OAG), an organization of distinguished users and ecosystem suppliers. Helping to develop new features and capabilities for the OVM are founding members ARM, Cisco Systems Inc., Denali Software Inc., Freescale Semiconductor Inc., IBM Corp., Infineon Technologies, Nokia Corp, STMicroelectronics NV, and Xilinx Inc.
Input from the user community and members of the OAG, which first met in February 2008, is reflected in the latest release of the OVM, version 1.1, now available for download from OVM World at www.ovmworld.com. This release includes enhancements to stimulus generation that arise directly from user experiences. With more than 4400 registered users and hundreds of industry projects using the OVM, the OAG already has a wealth of suggestions and proposals to consider for future releases.
The Open Verification Methodology, based on the IEEE 1800-2005 SystemVerilog standard, is the industry’s first open, language-interoperable, SystemVerilog verification methodology. It provides a methodology and accompanying library that allow users to create modular, reusable verification environments, in which components communicate with each other via standard transaction-level modeling interfaces. It also enables intra- and inter-company reuse through a common methodology and classes for virtual sequences and block-to-system reuse, and full integration with other languages commonly used in production flows. The OVM and OVM World began in August 2007 as a joint effort by Cadence Design Systems and Mentor Graphics.
Cadence Design Systems
www.cadence.com
Mentor Graphics
www.mentor.com