SemiWiki: RAL, Lint and VHDL-2018Date: 2018/06/11 Type: In the Newsby Alex Tan Functional verification is a very effort intensive and heuristic process which aims at confirming that system functionalities are meeting the given specifications. While pushing cycle-time improvement on the back-end part of this process is closely tied to the compute-box selection (CPU speed, memory capacity, parallelism option), the front-end involves many painstaking setup preparation and coding. As such, any automation and incremental checks on the quality of work for both the design and the embedded codes used for its verification should help prevent unnecessary iterations and shorten the overall front-end setup time. UVM Register Generator Register Abstraction Layer (RAL) was part of the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) supported features introduced in 2011. It provides a high-level abstraction for manipulating the content of registers in your design. All of the addresses and bit fields can get replaced with human readable names. RAL attempts to mirror the values of the design registers in the testbench, so one could use the register model to access those registers. A RAL model comprises fields grouped into registers, which along with memories can be grouped into blocks or eventually grouped into systems. Aldec’s Riviera-PRO™ verification platform enables testbench productivity, reusability, and automation by combining the high-performance simulation engine, advanced debugging capabilities at different levels of abstraction. In its latest release (2018.02), it introduces RAL support. For the rest of this article, please visit SemiWiki.
