Portable VHDL Testbench Automation with Intelligent Testbench Automation

We've come a long way since digital designs were sketched as schematics by hand on paper and tested in the lab by wiring together discrete integrated circuits, applying generated signals and checking for proper behavior. Design evolved to gate-level on a workstation and on to RTL, while verification evolved from simple directed tests to directedrandom, constrained-random, and systematic testing. At each step in this evolution, significant investment has been made in training, development of reusable infrastructure, and tools. This level of investment means that switching to a new verification environment, for example, has a cost and tends to be a carefully-planned migration rather than an abrupt switch. In any migration process, technologies that help to bring new advances into the existing environment while continuing to be valuable in the future are critical methodological "bridges".