Verification IP: 7 Things I Learned By Browsing Cadence Online Support Last Month

Using proven Cadence Verification IP (VIP), you can verify SoC designs faster, more thoroughly, and with less effort. While innovating and providing great products and technologies, the VIP team at Cadence also believes that it is important to keep creating self-help knowledge resources. These resources provide an easy way for you to learn about and stay productive with these products, technologies, and methodologies while also efficiently debugging problems that you may encounter. Here are seven great application notes and guides, available on Cadence Online Support, to help with your next project.

1. Integrating Cadence USB 2.0 Verification IP over DpDm Interface: The DUT has a traditional DpDm Interface which is a two-wire bi-directional interface as per the USB 2.0 standard. This two-wire interface in Cadence VIP is modeled as a set of TX-RX unidirectional interface, which is essentially a four-wire interface. In order to connect a DUT with bidirectional interface to Cadence VIP, which has a unidirectional interface, a translator is required to bridge the gap. This translator primarily depends upon two things, which we seek from the user and is mandatory for us to accomplish this translator.

a.) Strength modeling conventions used by the customer for his bi-directional Interface so that for USB 2.0 traffic, one USB 2.0 terminology is distinguished from another on the basis of different strengths used by the DUT on the DpDm interface.

b.) If any of the strengths for two or multiple phases of USB 2.0 traffic are similar, then we require a reference from the DUT/testbench to differentiate between them so that it can be appropriately accounted for in the translator.

This application note, "Integrating Cadence USB 2.0 Verification IP over DpDm Interface," is written to help you create, configure, and instantiate Cadence USB 2.0 Verification IP in the testbench.

2. Another application note, "Integrating Two or More Single-Protocol Examples into One Multi-Protocol Example", illustrates the needed steps to take two or more single-protocol examples shipped with the Cadence VIP Catalog product and combine them into one multi-protocol example. This would resemble a DUT that has multiple interfaces of different protocol types.

This app note comes with an example test case to demonstrate that the application is intended for VIP Catalog users who want to create multi-protocol examples based on existing examples in the VIP Catalog, with or without a real DUT. This app note uses the UVM-SV flow and, thus, uses the UVM-SV layer of the VIP and its UVM-SV examples. However, portions of it are relevant to other flows as well.

3. Migrating from SOMA to UVM Configuration: This app note outlines all the steps required to migrate from the existing SOMA-based flow to the UVM configuration flow in the SV UVM environment.

4. Interconnect Validator (IVD) Usage: This feature document provides you with information about the following features:

 Interconnect Validator (from the VIPCAT release) includes Interconnect Monitor.

5. Using UVM Transaction Recording for Debugging with the USB VIP : Verifying USB designs is a challenging task in and of itself, and is even more difficult because of the complexity of the protocol. Both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 designs are used over a variety of interfaces - in DpDm, UTMI, ULPI, HSIC, PIPE, and SSIC. It can become even tougher when a verification engineer has to debug the design over a typical functional environment, such as using waveforms.

The Cadence USB VIP continuously offers better and easier debugging mechanisms using generated trace files and logs, as users are increasingly using UVM-based test environments to verify USB designs. The Cadence USB VIP can also be employed using transaction recording offered by UVM libraries for easier and efficient GUI-based debugging modes. Transaction recording can be used for on-the-fly debugging of VIP data transfer and register event tracking. It can be extended to a global transaction stream or a layered peer-to-peer data flow mechanism. It is very useful in tracking VIP state machine(s) transitions.

This application note, "Using UVM Transaction Recording for Debugging with the USB VIP," can help you debug using UVM transaction recording in the USB VIP.

6. Ethernet Management Protocol (MDIO Interface) Complete Self-Help Guide: Nowadays, our users demand lot of self-help guides. When the Cadence VIP R&D team identified one such need, one of the R&D engineers developed a great document to help Ethernet users understand management data input/output (MDIO).The MDIO is a two-wire serial interface used to manage single/multiple PHYs connected to a MAC controller.

The purpose of this latest app note, "Ethernet Management Protocol (MDIO Interface) Complete Self-Help Guide" is to provide basic information about management interfaces used in the Ethernet 802.3 protocol to transfer the status and control information between management entity and managed PHY.

Any Cadence Ethernet users who also use the MDIO management interface to access management registers will greatly benefit from this wonderful collateral.

7. ICM Error Messages Guide: This document provides information about error/check messages from Interconnect Monitor.

The Interconnect Monitor is available in two products:

A. Interconnect Validator (Coherent), part number VPIVDC

B. Interconnect Validator (Basic), part number VPIVDB

The ICM Error Messages Guide describes the following error messages:

Please log in with your Cadence credentials at https://support.cadence.com/ to access any of these troubleshooting documents and application notes, along with videos and Rapid Adoption Kits from Cadence Online Support, the Cadence Self-Help and Learning Portal for our customers. 

Happy Learning!

Sumeet Aggarwal