Mark Olen
Mentor Graphics

Several years ago, advances in testbench automation enabled verification engineers to test more functionality by dramatically increasing the quantity of testbench sequences for simulation. Through clever randomization techniques, constrained by algebraic expressions, verification teams were able to create testbench programs that generated many times more sequences than directed testbench programs could.

The latest advances in intelligent testbench automation now enable large simulations to be automatically distributed across up to 1000 CPUs, extending non-redundant sequence generation to entire simulation server farms. This massive gain in efficiency is attributable to the inherent architecture of rule-graphs and new advanced traversal algorithms tuned for production applications. This paper explains how this architecture enables staggering productivity enhancements in functional verification that reach beyond verification engineering, and into production simulation.