Sunday, August 19, 2012

TLM 2.0 Non-blocking Transport in UVM !!!


Many times we need to generate a transaction reactively based on the response. One of the protocols i can think of which requires reactive generation of transaction is USB. UVM has non-blocking transport which is  an appropriate fit for reactive random stimulus generation. Non blocking transport can be used by the initiator and target to update each other’s progress. We have method like nb_transport_fw () which is used to send the transaction from initiator to target. nb_transport_bw () method is used to send transaction from the target to the initiator.  The initiator modifies the transaction before the call to the nb_transport_fw() after which the object should not be modified.  The target can modify the transaction object before the call to nb_transport_bw () after which the object should not be modified. Each call to the forward and backward methods are accompanied by phase change , different type of phases are UNINTIALIZED_PHASE, BEGIN_REQ, END_REQ, BEGIN_RESP & END_RESP. Forward and backward function return a status UVM_TLM_ACCEPTED,UVM_TLM_UPDATED & UVM_TLM_COMPLETED these status indicate the status of the transaction - accepted , updated and completed.