PCI SIG Update: Latest on PCIe Gen4 0.7 VIP and Test Suite
The PCI-SIG Developers Conference 2016 was held at Santa Clara in last week and it was a great success. Our PCIe experts were there and we bring you the highlights of conference.
There was a lot of interest and queries from attendees regarding our latest version of the PCI VIP for Gen 4. The VIP supports the latest version of the Gen 4 Specification, 0.7. We have many early adopter customers utilizing the latest specifications and leveraging our up-to-date VIP for accelerated verification closure. Some of our customers are close to tape out and signing off verification with our VIP. There were questions about how we identify and keep tests up to date with every changing Gen 4 spec. We illustrated this for a few of our tests showing the entire flow starting with linking the pdf spec to our tests using Verdi Spec Linking. The tool not only allows for the creation of a verification plan based using the spec as an input but it also supports spec updates by ‘diffing’ the previous and new version of the spec to make sure features still apply.
There were variety of queries and we observed that the major challenges in PCI verification being faced by fellow verification engineers are ranging from protocol compliance and checks, high level interface for packet generation and error injection, to specification linking to test plan and coverage, and performance concerns like memory footprint etc. There were system level verification challenges like verification of a switch with large number of instances etc. We went over key features of the VIP and test suites to overcome the above mentioned verification challenges including extensive protocol checks, tests for compliance, flexible error injection, Verdi spec linking, ease of debug etc.
If you had a chance to drop by the booth we appreciate it; it was good to meet so many existing customers and have you share your success with the VIP and Test Suites.
To know more about PCIe VIP, please visit http://synopsys.com/vip
Authored by Paul Graykowski and Ankur Jain
