Mentor Graphics expands Questa multi-view verification components library to support larger set of standard protocols

WILSONVILLE, USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. today announced that the quickly-growing library of Questa Multi-view Verification Components (MVCs) has been expanded to support additional industry standard protocols: Ethernet up to 40G/100G (IEEE P802.3ba, draft 2.1), USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 and DDR2 (double data rate SDRAM interface).

The Questa MVC library dramatically improves verification coverage, and helps speed the functional verification of integrated circuits (ICs) using industry-standard protocols.

Mentor’s Questa MVCs allow designers to avoid the pain and expense of creating and supporting their own verification IP for system-level, TLM-level and RTL-level verification. With Questa MVCs, the verification team is able to connect to any level of abstraction from system to gates – ensuring consistent model behavior and giving the verification team more options to improve performance and increase coverage.

The Questa MVC technology also greatly reduces the labor-intensive and error-prone manual interpretation of signal activity. This allows simulation results, from RTL verification, to be viewed as sequences of initiated transactions and responses, with the RTL signal activity correlated to a higher level transaction view of activity.

Each protocol supported by the Questa MVC library includes a verification plan with full coverage metrics that integrates with the Questa verification management system. The verification plan easily integrates into hierarchical full-chip verification plans. Questa verification management provides visibility into the status of the verification process by providing correlation of coverage metrics to the verification plan.

“The MVC library fully supports OVM 2.0 with stimulus generation, reference checking, monitoring and functional coverage for popular protocols,” said Stephen Bailey, director of product marketing for the Design Verification Technology division of Mentor. “The advantage of Questa MVCs is that teams using a coverage-driven verification process such as the one supported by Questa can easily include the protocol verification plan in the comprehensive, hierarchical verification plan.”

Questa MVC support for Ethernet up to 40G/100G, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 and DDR2 is available immediately.

Questa Functional Verification Platform
The Questa functional verification platform combines high performance and high capacity with the most comprehensive verification capabilities in the industry. Assertion-based Verification (ABV), intelligent testbench automation, Multi-view Verification Components (MVC), and Coverage-driven Verification (CDV) are supported natively by the Questa platform’s high-performance assertion engine; a modern, high-performance constraint solver; and extensive functional coverage features, including verification management leveraging the Unified Coverage Database (UCDB).

Verification of low- power design functionality can be proven in an RTL environment with power-aware functional verification. This full set of advanced verification functionality is enabled by a flexible Open Verification Methodology (OVM 2.0) that delivers unrivaled language and feature support in any design and verification flow.