| This is the second of our books designed to help the professional verifier manage complexity. This time, we have responded to a growing interest not only in object-oriented programming but also in SystemVerilog. The writing of this second handbook has been just another step in an ongoing masochistic endeavor to make your professional lives as painfree as possible.
The authors are not special people. We have worked in several companies, large and small, made mistakes, and generally muddled through our work. There are many people in the industry who are smarter than we are, and many coworkers who are more experienced. However, we have a strong desire to help.
We have been in the lab when we bring up the chips fresh from the fab, with customers and sales breathing down our necks. We’ve been through software bring-up and worked on drivers that had to work around bugs1 in production chips.
What we feel makes us unique is our combined broad experience from both the software and hardware worlds. Mike has over 20 years of experience from the software world that he applies in this book to hardware verification. Robert has over 12 years of experience with hardware verification, with a focus on environments and methodology.
What we bring to the task of functional verification is over three decades of combined experience, from design, verification, software development, and management. It is our experiences that speak in this handbook. It is our desire that others might learn and benefit from these experiences.
We have had heated discussions over each line of code in this book and in our open-source libraries. We rarely agree at first, but by having to argue our cases we arrive at what we feel are smart, efficient, flexible, and simple solutions. Most of these we have “borrowed” from the software industry but have applied to the field of verification. |
