Monday, July 14, 2008, 03:01 PM - Hardcore verification
Yaron Ilani, a fellow blogger has posted an interesting interview with Mark Hampton, the CTO of Certess, a company specializing in "functional qualificaion. Functional qualification, I have just learned, is a new technology that introduces artificial bugs into an HDL design, to check how good your testbench is. If this sounds interesting, or if you'd just like to impress the girls in your team with your deep knowledge of the latest trends, go ahead and read some more. [ add comment ] | permalink |
( 2.9 / 57 )Saturday, June 21, 2008, 09:45 AM - Hardcore verification
It took me a while (about 1.5 year of working with SV), but I’ve just realised that dynamic arrays are just plain useless: Whatever a dynamic array can do, a queue can do much better. A queue could be resized using new[] just like an array, but it would also be resized automatically when you add an element, or a list of elements. You could use two variables to slice a queue, which you can’t do with an array, and this alone is a good enough reason to forget about dynamic arrays for eternity. And, in general, every function or language structure that would work with a dynamic array, would also work with a queue. You could also randomize queues of course.
And why did it take me such a long time to figure this out? Obviously, because no one in his right mind expects a language to have some outright redundant constructs. I was assuming that if dynamic arrays are there, then there must be some raison d'être, some hidden super-power that I haven’t come-across yet. Well, I guess I should have read what I’ve written some weeks ago first…Then I would have realised much earlier that the results of committee work, don’t always follow the most basic rules of common-sense.
So, the bottom line is, whenever you write something like that:
int a[];
Just go ahead and place that $ inside:
int a[$]
This dollar comes for free, and it can give back so much.
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( 3 / 164 )Tuesday, June 17, 2008, 05:07 PM - Hardcore verification
Just learned that Cadence is trying to preform a hostile takeover of Mentor.
Will I soon become Cadence employee? Will "die hard" Specman survive?
Judging by this article (which makes sense for a business ignorant guy like myself), probably not...
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