Intent:
The BFM Notification Pattern is an Analysis Pattern to facilitate the design of transactors for dual domain partitioned testbenches that provide effective and efficient notifications of protocol transaction occurrences, and any other interesting protocol and design events and conditions, for testbench control and analysis.
Motivation:
In accordance with the established analysis connection topology of a modern testbench, and for optimal performance in a dual domain testbench with partitioned HVL and HDL module hierarchies, HDL BFM interfaces or modules should autonomously observe protocol transactions, and any signal-level protocol and design events and conditions, and push out corresponding notifications (interrupt occurred, reset asserted, transaction completed, etc.) to their respective HVL class proxies where these notifications can be further broadcasted to the upper testbench layers, for instance using standard TLM-based communication semantics. This is in contrast with the upper testbench layers initiating such monitoring activity, through the proxies, by polling for transactions, or signal or state changes, which is unnatural and generally inefficient.
Applicability:
The BFM Notification Pattern is applicable in any situation demanding a common dual domain partitioned testbench architecture (i.e., separated HVL and HDL module hierarchies) for both simulation and emulation, and across verification engines in general.
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