Verification language set for standardisation

The IEEE Design Automation Standards Committee has approved a project to use the e verification language as a basis for standardisation.

The IEEE Design Automation Standards Committee (DASC) has approved a project to use the e verification language as a basis for standardisation.

The IEEE Standards Association has assigned the project the number 1647.

This marks a significant step for the verification industry as e is now the first verification language to be considered by the IEEE.

In addition, DASC standards have an expedited path to the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) submission process, facilitating further international adoption of DASC standards.

"I'm delighted to see such strong interest in developing a verification language standard and from such a broad cross-section of the industry.

Such interest is one of the core necessities for a successful standard", said Paul Menchini, Chair, IEEE Design Automation Standards Committee.

"We thank the Verification Language Study Group (VLSG) and the DASC for their hard work in taking these important first steps towards standardisation".

"Intel believes in open standards and continues to work with EDA vendors in support of such standards", said Greg Spirakis, Vice President of Design Technology at Intel.

"As such, Intel fully supports Verisity's bid to have its e verification language form the basis of an IEEE verification language standard".

"Open standards encourage effective IP re-use and benefit the industry as a whole", said Jonathan Morris, System Level Design Program Manager, ARM.

"We support this move to make the e language more easily accessible to the design community".

"Open industry standards are vital to the engineering community and Verisity has always supported standards", said Moshe Gavrielov, Chief Executive Officer for Verisity.

"Verisity's commitment to standardise on the e language is in direct response to overwhelming customer demand.

Having a standard verification language is critical to the industry and we are proud to see such strong support for Verisity's e verification language".

The e verification language was developed by Verisity in 1992 to drive the Company's market-leading Specman Elite testbench automation solution.

From the start, e was designed to meet the unique needs of the verification community.

As Specman Elite gained significant market momentum and verification engineers adopted Verisity's verification methodology, the significant benefits that the e language brings to the entire verification process became clear.

In direct response to customer and EDA partner demand, Verisity began the process of making e an industry standard in 2000 by making the e verification language available to third parties through its LicenseE programme.

This announcement marks a significant and vital step in that process for standardisation.

Verisity has always been committed to standardising the e language and began working towards standardising the language over two years ago.

Verisity believed that in order to make a successful standard, it must meet a number of criteria.

De facto usage - the format must be in use by a significant part of the market, including strategic customers that influence the marketplace.

The LicenseE Steering Committee consists of major industry players committed to driving the e language towards standardisation.

Customers participating on the LicenseE Steering Committee include: ARM, Cisco Systems, Infineon, LSI Logic, PMC Sierra and STMicroelectronics.

Third-party pull - there must also be a large pull from third parties to interoperate with the e verification language.

Verisity created the LicenseE programme in 2000 to license the e language to third parties in order to facilitate interoperability between third-party verification solutions.

Partners licensing the e language for tool development include: @HDL, Averant, Axis Systems, NoBug Consulting, Novas Software, Prover Technologies, STARC, SynaptiCAD and TNI-Valiosys.

Interested standards bodies - there must be interest in developing the format into a formal standard from standards organisations.

The news that IEEE's DASC has approved a project to use the e verification language as a basis for standardisation is the result of significant interest from the industry and marketplace.

The founder and Chief Technical Officer of Verisity, Yoav Hollander, invented the e verification language in order to enable the latest technologies and methodologies for functional verification.

One important requirement for the language was to ensure a way to reuse verification environments across projects and increase productivity for verification teams.

The e language is a single-inheritance, garbage-collected, object oriented language with several features geared for verification, including: declarative constraints for test generation; complete protocol/assertion language; coverage specifications; support for aspect oriented programming (AOP) for combining distinct specification aspects; the capability to use both declarative and procedural code, including the capability to define new declarative constructs; and constructs for describing timing and synchronisation, interfacing to HDLs, low-level file and string operations.

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