Re: SV APIs (Assertion)

Subject: Re: SV APIs (Assertion)
From: Bassam Tabbara (bassam@novas.com)
Date: Tue Oct 01 2002 - 10:55:49 PDT

Kev, you cc-ed sv-ec did you mean sv-ac ? (there is a mismatch in your email :-)!). I removed that from my response.

1) Thx for the email, I now understand what you meant on the phone.

2) This is -already- in SV-AC in fact a primitive form is in 3.0 (see Chapter 11), and it is slated to be done in a DAS 2.0 with an event control mechanism as you suggest. That said, I don't see what this has to do with our work here. Our task is to come up with "VPI" (design + assertions), it is a matter of conveniences that we are calling VPI (design) and API (Assertion-PI :-)!!!!!).

So I'm afraid I again lost your point, we do need some access mechanism provided for external tools/utilities to traverse, read, write ("control") and so on.... Are you and I on the same page or not ?

Thx.
-Bassam.

P.S. The calling C <-> SV is indeed slated for this group, again also VPI, and what I called API :-)!!

Kevin Cameron wrote:

Since a lot of C and C++ functionality has been (or is being) pulled into the SV
language, it seems less important to me that we add new APIs. Most C/C++
code could probably be translated into SV and probably would compile more
efficiently (since it wouldn't have to go through an API).

IMO we should concentrate on low-level cross-calling mechanisms (calling
C directly from SV, and C back into SV via tasks and functions), so that
it is easy to link libraries of SV and C/C++ code.

WRT to the assertion API, it would make more sense to me to implement the
control functions (enable, diasble, reset etc.) in SV and to do call-backs as regular
events in SV, e.g.

        @(<assertion name>) ....

Since the Testbench donation adds new event types beyond the Verilog "one-shot"
that mechanism should handle all the assertion states.

The Assertion API requirements should be passed on to the AC committee for
inclusion in the SV language proper.

Regards,
Kev.

-- 
Dr. Bassam Tabbara
Technical Manager, R&D

Novas Software, Inc.
bassam@novas.com
(408) 467-7893
 

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