Factory replacement in the scenario generator scenario using ‘.using’ gotcha !!!

When you want to do a factory replacement of a transaction class in your scenario,we assign the factory to .using.

Scenario.using=transaction_factory;

The gotcha in this factory replacement is we need to implement the allocate() and copy() methods in the extended class for the factory replacement to work.


Many times i have seen people including myself spending time debugging their code when using “.using” for factory replacement as they are not aware of the gotcha.Maybe the RVM/VMM documentation should have this requirement highlighted so that the user can easily understand this requirement.

Atomic generator using allocate() !!!

RVM/VMM atomic and scenario generator randomizes a blueprint pattern which is assigned with the extended class (factory) , the copy of the randomized blueprint is pushed into the channel. Most of the RVM/VMM users use this approch in there custom generators. Is there a different way of implementing your atomic generator without using a copy() method ?. The answer is yes, following method can be used to generate atomic transaction without using copy().




For the above code to work you need to implement the allocate method in your extended class. The extended class is assigned to the factory before the start_xactor() method is called.

ASIC verification tasks verification engineers dislike the most !!!

I was having a friendly discussion with few of my fellow verification engineers, we were discussing about the verification tasks they dislike the most. The conclusion from the discussion was they disliked verification tasks which were laborious, which requires manual effort and had very little learning opportunity. The verification task they disliked are as follows.


1)Language migration without the help of a commercial language conversion tool
2)Code coverage analysis and identification of code coverage exclusions.
3) “X” tracing while debugging gate level simulation.
4)Release management ( Tagging the release code ,Triggering regression and debug of regression results ,becomes messy when more that 25 people are involved and release management is handled by a single person)
5)Working on outdated technology which is away from the verification market movement.