Dave Whipp's ASIC Design Verification Pages
Verification of modern ASIC designs is a complex process, and is often
cited as a bottlenect in the ASIC design process. This is largely
because the designs of the ASICs are, themselves, getting ever more
complex; but I believe that the main cause of the verificatiuon
bottleneck is the methodology that underpins it. Even today, many
managers believe that we should still apply the principles that were
developed when the size of the chips was measured in millions of
transistors, not billions. Todays ASICs are akin to medium scale
software sytems.
My first job in HW verification was as a summer intern in 1990. This
followed my first year at UMIST (now Univerity of Manchester)
studying for my degree in Microelectronic Systems Engineering. Twenty
years later, in January 2011, I moved to Google to work as a Software
Engineer. Testing is a signifiant part of my role there, but software
testing and hardware verification are suprisingly different beasts.
Papers
These are papers I've presented over the years. Most have been presented at DesignCon. Although the audiences can be fairly small there, I like the ability to fully explore a subject in their 40 minute presentations.
Other Stuff
Various writings and presentations, which are less rigorous that full papers. You might also be interested in my software pages.
Verification Links
- DV Club an organisation where Verification Engineers meet for a lunch and to listen to a talk.
- Link to Mike Mintz's verification pages: trusster.com.
- Janick Bergeron's Verification Guild
- GreenLight LLC: home of Pivot, a testbench (Verilog PLI) module for Perl
- SystemC: a modeling class-library for C++
As I said above, this is in a state of constant (but fairly low
frequency) change. I always welcome any suggestions for content (or
style, or whatever) you may have: some of the posts I reference above
are a direct result of questions people have asked me either by email
or when we met at conferences. My public email address is dave@whipp.name (be aware that public email addresses can have harsh spam filters -- use a subject that begins "DV:" to be safe)
home