Subject: Re: SV APIs (Assertion)
From: Bassam Tabbara (bassam@novas.com)
Date: Wed Oct 02 2002 - 18:53:49 PDT
Stuart Sutherland wrote:
Thank you for the [albeit negative] encouragement !
If I may be just a little blunt... I have not been able to attend any of
the SV-CC conference calls because they are not being held on Mondays, but
I have been reading all the e-mails. Thus far it does not appear to me
from the e-mail that any significant progress or even fundamental decisions
have been made by the SV-CC committee. If the committee does not draw a
line in the sand soon on what will go into SystemVerilog 3.1 and what will
be postponed until SystemVerilog 3.2, the committee will end up still
debating the great pie in the sky when I'm doing the final editing on the
SV 3.1 manual. Remember, you only have until March to be completely
finished defining what you want in SV 3.1.
VPI already got dropped I believe, Yatin can correct me.
[switching hats...] I was co-chair of the 1364-2001 standards group PLI
task force. Speaking from that perspective, I would like to recommend the
SV-CC either leave defining that PLI interface to the IEEE 1364 committee,
or create a totally separate SV committee to do that work. Do not try to
have the same committee defining both the DirectC/Cblend like interface and
the VPI-like interface. You will never finish if one committee tries to
tackle too much at once. My experience with the PLI for both 1364-1995 and
1364-2001 is that most of that type of API cannot be defined until AFTER
all constructs that affect the HDL are well defined and stable. For SV
3.1, you will not have that stability from the SV-AC, SV-BC or SV-EC
committees in time to define a VPI-like API for SV 3.1. The same thing
applies to the notion of having a direct SV API that can do everything the
PLI can do. You will not be able to define all that capability until the
SV 3.1 language itself is stable. So just put that idea on a back burner
and concentrate on defining something useful to hardware engineers.
-- Dr. Bassam Tabbara Technical Manager, R&D Novas Software, Inc. bassam@novas.com (408) 467-7893
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