Hi, Let me try this again.
The VHDL standards community has been considering whether to enhance VHDL to add advanced testbench features.
If you are a VHDL user, Do you want these features added to VHDL? Would you rather adopt a verification language that already supports these (SystemVerilog, SystemC, E, Vera).
I think VHDL needs these features to stay competitive.
The current plan in the VHDL working group is to make these features similar to other verification languages while at the same time keeping the nature of VHDL.
We need your to voice your support. You can post here, send your reply to me (let me know if I can use either your name and/or company name when I tally the results for the Accellera VHDL TSC), or join the Accellera VHDL TSC (which you can do as a non-Accellera member by registering) and post your reply there.
More on the politics of the situation are below.
Thanks, Jim Lewis VHDL Evangelist SynthWorks VHDL Training
P.S. One of the simulator vendors has indicated that will only implement new features if the user community demands them. Business wise, this makes sense - you don't build something unless someone will buy it.
If you fail to voice your support, they may be able to successfully block these proposals from going forward.
If we let this opportunity to add these features to the standard pass, I do not think we will have to opportunity to add them later - hence you will be stuck with using some other language for advanced verification features.
This work is work in progress and below is the current status. Keep in mind too that your interest/support of this work will help raise the focus and inspiration of those doing the work.
Classes / OO: Classes are useful for creating verification data structures, transaction communication, and grouping for transaction based randomization (building relationships between separate data items). Many of the data structures (such as scoreboards, memories, and linked structures) can already be created, however, classes give you the ability to hide all pointer manipulations. For example, using a memory would require a declaration with initialization of the memory data structure, then MemWrite and MemRead would allow a user to store and retrieve items from the data structure. Pointers and allocation of the sparse data structure are handled by MemWrite and MemRead and the user would not need to be aware of it. Status: Peter Ashenden submitted a class proposal last year and provided updates to it this year at DVCon. Currently he plans on finishing an updated draft soon.
Randomization: Randomization is useful for designs that have numerous configurable features. Testing features individually in an isolated manner is typically straightforward. However, testing how these features interact can be a large verification space ? one that may not be able to be simulated completely. It is also may be difficult to predict all of the corner cases. Randomization has been used to sequence a test in a non-deterministic way to get reasonably good coverage of this verification space. While I do not share the thought that randomization should be adapted to work for all verification problems, I do believe it to be a valuable technique for some problems.
I wrote a draft of the randomization proposal and it is ready for review.
Functional Coverage: Tool/structural coverage can tell you that you did a FIFO read or that the the FIFO went empty, but it can't tell you that you did a read while the FIFO was empty.
Functional coverage constructs allow you to track this. Some functional coverage capability will come from assertions (since PSL has been integrated into VHDL). Additional constructs will be added to allow data binning (coverage groups) and correlation between different coverage items (cross coverage).
I have started working on this - anyone else who is interested is welcome to contribute as much as they would like.
With a focused effort, like the one to finish the Accellera 3.0 draft of the standard, I think we can be done with these by September.
Although some have expressed doubt, it is clear that vendors will do what their user community asks them to do - otherwise, someone else will and, as a result, will earn your business.
Jim