OVM has recently suffered from the lack of a good, up-to-date textbook. So it's good news to see that UVM now has a great textbook written by the verification experts at Cadence.   A Practical Guide to Adopting the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) is both a valuable reference for novices and an impressive treasury of verification knowledge for experts.  It's also pitched at a good price for a technical textbook. Having had a sneak preview of the contents, I recommend you rush out and buy a copy before the first print run sells out - which it will do, fast.  We hope to bring you a in-depth review of this book as soon as they start shipping.

Esperan has just released it's UVM training class - SystemVerilog Advanced Verification using UVM1.0ea. This is a version of our hugely popular OVM training, adapted to use the Accellera's Early Adopter version of the UVM library.

 

If you are new to SystemVerilog Verification, or are considering transitioning to UVM, then we recommend the UVM training class.

 

If, however, you are existing OVM users, then the current OVM class may be preferable.

 

At the moment, since UVM1.0 = OVM2.1, it is possible to take either the OVM or UVM class and be able to write verification environments with either library. However, as future development is concentrated on UVM, we expect significant differences to start to appear between OVM and UVM training by the end of the year.

The first official release of UVM 1.0 EA (early adopter) kit is now available from the Accellera web site. The main difference between UVM1.0EA and OVM2.1.1 is to rename all ovm_* identifiers to uvm_* .

More specifically the renaming is as follows:-

• ovm_ replaced with uvm_
• OVM_ replaced with UVM_
• tlm_ replaced with uvm_tlm_
• TLM_ replaced with UVM_TLM_

and yes - there is a script in the kit to do this automatically.

 

There's a couple of other things to watch out for if you try using this release:-

Read more »

The Accellera committee responsible for defining the new UVM standard have had a change of mind, and have formally voted to base UVM on the latest release of the OVM library, version 2.1.1, rather than OVM2.0.3 which was the original decision.

 

This is a good decision from Accellera and great news for existing OVM users. Engineers can now use the new features of OVM2.1 (objection mechanisms, callbacks etc) with the knowledge that they will work in UVM. Needless to say there has been a fair amount of relief on the Cadence and Mentor verification blogs.

 

So the bottom line, as aptly defined by Tom Anderson from Cadence, is that "UVM = OVM" now, but with the Accellera committee moving onto new features and technology, we fully expect "UVM > OVM". His blog post is well worth a visit.

OVM2.1.1 has been released. There are few new features in this release, it is mainly a bug-fix for OVM2.1, particularly in the areas of reporting and the objection mechanism. The new release is available from OVM World and the release notes list all the bug, documentation and miscellaneous fixes.