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I am a big fan of the television show Jeopardy! and, like many of you, I have been intrigued by James Holzhauer, who, as of this writing, is now the second-winningest contestant in the show’s history. During his current 22-game winning streak (Ken Jennings won 74 consecutive games in 2004), Holzhauer has amassed $1,691,008 in winnings (vs. $2,520,700 for Jennings), including the top 11 single-game totals in the show’s history.

For those of you not familiar with the show, it is a general-knowledge quiz show consisting of two rounds in which players choose from six clue categories, each of which has five clues, which are assigned increasing dollar values from top to bottom. Players are awarded the dollar amount for a correct response, and given the next choice of clue, or they have that amount deducted for an incorrect response. The third round, called “Final Jeopardy,” consists of a single question on which contestants can wager as much as they wish.

Holzhauer has achieved his amazing success through two complementary approaches. The first is his analytics-based approach to the game. Instead of starting at the top (lowest-value) clue in a category and proceeding down through the same category, as most players tend to do, he starts with the bottom higher-value clue of a given category and proceeds across the bottom of the board to accumulate large amounts of money very quickly. Since the “Daily Double” squares (which allow the contestant to bet as much money as they wish) tend to be towards the bottom of the board, Holzhauer often is able to further enrich his total before his opponents have really gotten started. Of course, the other key to his success is that he has answered 97% of the questions correctly.

The only comparable Jeopardy! performance I can recall is watching Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day where he knows all the answers because he has seen the same episode over and over again and has obviously memorized the answers. I think both of these examples show that just doing things the way you’ve always done them is not the path to success, especially when your competition is changing the game. So, with this thought in mind, we’ve assembled a great DAC edition of Verification Horizons for you, with each article showing how you can take a new approach to some aspect of functional verification.

We start this issue with “SystemC FMU for Verification of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems” from my colleagues, Keroles Khalil and Magdy A. El-Moursy, over in Egypt. They discuss how to package Virtual Platforms with real software to create functional mock-up units that model pieces of a car. By putting these pieces together using a standard functional mock-up interface, you can assemble a system-of-systems to model and verify complex digital, analog, and mechanical systems, including things as complex as a complete ADAS system.

After that, Rich Edelman will show us how to have “Fun with UVM Sequences – Coding and Debugging.” In his own inimitable way, Rich walks us through a progression of increasingly complex (and previously intimidating) sequences and shows us that they’re all “just code” and nothing to be afraid of. He also shows us how Questa can help you visualize your transactions to make debug easier.

Next, we continue our Portable Stimulus series by Matthew Ballance with “Creating Test the PSS Way in SystemVerilog.” In it we learn how Questa inFact enables Portable Stimulus (PSS) so you can focus on what you want to verify instead of worrying about how to model it in SystemVerilog/UVM. We’ve packaged some of the critical Portable Stimulus capabilities into PSS Apps that can read in existing SystemVerilog classes and covergroups to give you better verification productivity by getting the most out of your existing testbenches.

Next, we have a couple of articles from our formal verification team. In “Formal Bug Hunting with ‘River Fishing’ Techniques” from my colleagues Mark Eslinger and Ping Yeung, we see how to identify good “fishing spots” to focus formal verification to find more bugs. As designs get more complex, trying to uncover bugs by starting formal analysis at time 0 gets more difficult and less efficient, so instead we leverage simulation traces to explore interesting states that will help us uncover deep-state bugs.

We follow that with “Don’t Forget the Protocol! A CDC Protocol Methodology to Avoid Bugs in Silicon,” where we learn a complete clock-domain crossing methodology that overcomes the challenges you may encounter in verifying designs with multiple clock-domains.

The first article in our Partners’ Corner is from our friends at Agnisys. They discuss “Auto-Generating Implementation-Level Sequences for PSS.” If you’ve been following our recent Portable Stimulus articles, you’re familiar with the new PSS standard that lets you create an abstract activity graph to define the scheduling relationships between critical actions that you want to execute. The implementations of those actions are provided using what PSS calls exec blocks, which use either code templates or imported method calls in the target language. Agnisys has developed a tool that will let you define complex low-level sequences of register- and pin-manipulation operations and auto-generate correct-by-construction exec block definitions for a variety of target languages that you can use in your PSS model.

We wind up this time with a tutorial-level article from our new friends at DesignLinx Solutions, “UVMF, Beyond the ALU Generator Tutorial Extending Actual Test Control of the DUT Inputs.” The UVM Framework (UVMF) is a tool you can use to auto-generate a UVM verification environment, which you can then customize to add application-specific content to verify your design. This article provides some practical advice that goes beyond the tutorial provided in the UVMF installation to illustrate how to extend the top-level tests generated by UVMF to allow additional customization.

By the time you’re reading this, DAC will actually be here, and James Holzhauer may (or may not) still be winning at Jeopardy! But if you apply the lessons from these great articles, I know that you’ll be winning your verification battles soon. Please stop by the Verification Academy (#617) booth at DAC and say hi. I’d love to hear what your verification challenges are and talk with you about how we might be able to get you out of “jeopardy.”

Respectfully submitted,

Tom Fitzpatrick
Editor, Verification Horizons