Structures and union in system verilog !!!

VERA/NTB users migrating to system verilog have a tendency of not using structures and union construct in system verilog when architecting or implementing a system verilog verification environment. The reason being, this constructs are not available in VERA/NTB. Struct is pretty useful construct to group fields which are logically related to each other. It helps to organize you code. The union construct is very similar to a structure, but only one of the fields will be valid at a given point of time. Using packed struct and packed unions helps to organize fields in the memory without gaps, which in turn results in faster access to memory and results in faster simulation time.