Saturday, March 17, 2007, 12:05 PM - The verification hood
Those of you using xemacs with specman-mode.el to edit their e files should be aware of the following bugs:
1. Comments with -- mean trouble, and are not identified by the lisp file. If you have a such comment, none of the following lines will be parsed correctly. My advice - replace all of these immidiately with //
2. Comments that contain all kinds of exotic characters also cause problems. I'm referring mainly to code that you've commented out and contains such characters as '(' ')' '%' etc. Such lines will (a) prevent your code from being parsed and (b) will give you an annoying error everytime you add a newline.
This can be quite annoying because it actually means that you can't comment out code. To work around it, use the frog-marks after you comment code. This seem to reset the problem so that it doesn't affect lines below. for example:
// pack(packing.low, x, y)
'>
<'
The guys who wrote specman-mode.el don't seem to be releasing any new versions, so I guess new volunteers are required. I don't have a clue about lisp, so unfortunately I can't fix these myself...
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Thursday, March 15, 2007, 10:40 AM - Hardcore verification
Here's a short tip that I should have written long time ago. Say you are me at this very moment, and you have to run the an AHB eVC environment through a remote connection on a quite slow server. Say you're also done reading all your local newspapers over the internet, and waiting for 3 minutes for the whole AHB packege to load every time you change the very last top configuration file starts driving you out of your mind. In that case, you could do a simple thing...you just load the AHB eVC files, then save, then load your top configuration file. The next time instead of using reload you can just use restore, and then load your top file. Here's an AHB eVC example, but of course this could be done with any other package that takes time to load:
load vr_ahb/e/vr_ahb_top; #load the package
save vr_ahb_top.esv; #save specman state to file vr_ahb_top.esv
load e/ahb_config; #load your own configuration on top
test;
next time instead of rel:
restore vr_ahb_top.esv;
load e/ahb_config;
test;
If you are using several packages or eVCs on a regular basis then the best way would be just to load the top files of all of these packages and then save. For example, say you're using AHB and vr_ad eVCs:
load vr_ahb/e/vr_ahb_top;
load vr_ad/e/vr_ad_top;
....other eVCs come here
save my_evcs.esv
In fact, every specman release comes with a .esv file that includes the packages and eVCs that are built in into Specman (such as erm_lib) so that these packages are loaded seemlessly when you start Specman.
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Saturday, March 10, 2007, 10:59 AM - The verification hood
I keep getting emails from naive newbies asking me where they could download a specman evaluation version from. Well somebody must tell these guys the bitter truth at one point or another, so here it is:
There is no such thing as Specman evaluation version, so don't waste your time looking for it!
However, if you're not keen on learning e (and why should you be? SystemVerilog also has a considerable market share), and if you're willing to run a little risk, you can check the following tip from one of my friends!
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