Scripting

Verification engineer without good scripting skills is a magician without magic wand.

Scripting is primarily targeted to solving problems that are not directly related to the functional verification but related to the verification productivity enhancement. That does not mean it should not be used for the functional verification problems as well. It can be but most of functional verification problems are solved using specialized HVLs. HVLs are better suited for that. Typically in the areas where HVLs lack some capability is augmented with the conventional programming languages such as C/C++ rather than scripting languages. It’s changing recently. There are new developments taking place where simulators are providing the native integration to scripting languages. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Scripting can be shell scripting or popular-scripting languages such as Perl, Python or TCL. The idea here is to reach the working prototype very quickly. Many times the scripting solution validity is time limited to certain phase of the project. It’s important to minimize the investments in such scripts and still quickly have a working solution.

Productivity items can be in any of the four areas of the functional verification planning, development, regression and management.

In planning, verification plan management is one of the candidates. One of the key requirements is to store the test plan, coverage plan and checks plan in easy to customize form and to match the results from simulation runs.

In development, code generation can be one big area. Using the design patterns to enhance the code generation is growing fast. Initial development setup generation is a growing application.

In regression management running regressions, grouping the related failures so that only one of them can be pursued for debugging, regression status generation, and regression failure tracking and linking it with the bugs that have been filed are few problems requiring scripting. This is one of the areas where lot of repetitive activities takes place and hence the need for the automation is quite high.

In the verification project management the tracking data generation is very important. This data has to be generated periodically. The validity and usefulness of this data is short lived in regression phase. For example the data from weekly lives for a week. There is need for ensure that such reports can be generated automatically. This enables more frequent generation of the reports allowing leaders to stay more current with the execution status in order to make the right decision in time.

Scripting is one of the integral parts of the functional verification activity. It bridges the gaps in the standard tools. It also helps to build custom flows and tools to provide the edge over the competition.