Synopsys announced today on one of their blogs that they are donating VMM to a newly formed Accellera subcommitte. The subcommitte will “define a standard for verification interoperability”.
Are Mentor and Cadence going to participate in this effort?
Will OVM be donated as well?
What’s to “donate?” The OVM is already open sourced under an apache license. This means it can be used without restriction. Accellera can just download it like the rest of us and do whatever they want with it. That’s the short answer at least.
Perhaps if the VMM was also unencumbered, someone could re-base its communication infrastructure using the OSCI standard, or rework it to use OVM base classes ;) All these standards committees tend to have a glacial pace - fine for defining the nuances of a language, but probably too slow for a methodology. Just my humble opinion as I already work with whatever a client wants. The methodology is the easy part of verification :D
Paul
As the Mentor representative to the Accellera VIP-TSC, here’s my take:
Yes, Synopsys donated the VMM source code to Accellera, but only “for the purpose of exploring the VIP interoperability and integration problem” [see May 2 Meeting Minutes here]. In the “inside baseball” of Accellera, all that means is that the TSC can now see the VMM source code.
The charter of the TSC is to develop a scheme for VIP interoperability, NOT to define a common base-class library. The longer-term goal of the TSC may (with further authorization from the Accellera Board - not before January, 2009) be to develop a base-class library, but said library will include whatever interoperability mechanism is defined in the short-term.
The simple fact is that Synopsys had to make the donation so the TSC could have the same access to VMM that they already had for OVM, since OVM is open-source.
So, the donation of VMM does not mean that “OpenVMM” is the future. Nor does it mean that VMM is any more open today than it was last week. It was donated under the standard Accellera donation agreement, which means that Synopsys still owns it, but that Accellera TSC members can use it for the development of interoperability. The donation agreement does not allow other vendors access to the code for support purposes in any way - everyone is still limited by Synopsys’ rather onerous VMM terms.
So, all that’s happening is that the TSC now has the ability to develop some way for OVM and VMM (and SystemC, and e, and other) VIP to work together. Unless something changes, all it means is that VMM users will be able to interoperate with OVM (assuming Synopsys eventually implements enough SystemVerilog to support it), but their VMM code will still tie them to Synopsys’ tools. How open is that?
Rather than comment on what SNPS is doing, lets focus on the future of OVM and this new Accellera Technical Sub-Committee (TSC). The new TSC is chartered to address VIP interoperability. This is great news for the many OVM users that are moving away from legacy VMM to the only open solution available (SNPS has granted Accellera license to VMM, but has not opened to the public). Its also good to know that we gave the TSC access to OVM (the same access the whole world has to it – ITS OPEN) to start their work long before any they received any other source code.
In fact, this effort is very much in line with the theme Cadence and Mentor started with OVM almost a year ago. We recognized that the industry needed verification IP interoperability and portability to tackle modern verification problems. That’s one of the main reasons we created OVM. In fact, we solved the problem already by enabling OVM to run on 2/3 of the simulators in the industry. If the other one supports OVM, then we do have a level of interoperability already.
Regardless of the history, both Cadence and Mentor are very actively driving the TSC. We are staffing the TSC with our top methodology experts to create interoperability. Thank you for recognizing some of the advantages in OVM and we encourage you, the more than 3500 forum readers, and the rest of the OVM community to get involved with the TSC.
=Adam Sherilog