( ESNUG 478 Item 4 ) -------------------------------------------- [12/18/08]
Subject: Breker CEO explains his graph-based "intelligent testbench" tool
> Breker Treker -- Some weird "graph based verification" tool that Gary
> really loved. I sort of understood it. Sort of.
>
> - from http://www.deepchip.com/wiretap/070815.html
From: Adnan Hamid <adnan.hamid=user domain=brekersystems not calm>
Hi John,
We met at DAC 2007, and you wrote a blurb about not "getting" what Breker
Verification System's Trek product was trying to do in the verification
space. Thanks for the opportunity to take a shot at explaining how we
want to remove a productivity bottleneck in functional verification.
Breker is in the "intelligent testbench" arena. We approach verification
planning/automated test case generation through what we call graph-based
scenario planning (that we deliver in our Trek product.)
With 80% of random tests tending to hit only 20% of the functional intent
of the design, engineers run lots and lots of test. Test-benches are
consuming 60-80% of our simulation time.
Trek captures:
1) design intent knowledge about the possible outcomes that must be
tested,
and
2) knowledge about what pre-requisites and input are required to
satisfy those outcomes.
Trek gives the engineer a structured approach to thinking through all the
outcomes that must be tested and how to test them, like "extracting" design
intent out of the specification.
With Trek, the engineer would have enough information in the graph to write
a software program that can generate the directed test cases. The software
program traverses the graph, making decisions at each juncture and
collecting dependency information that is used in making choices for future
decisions. Trek begins by picking a combination of outcomes to test, then
solves for a set of inputs that should result in the outcome, drives the
input into the design (distributed over time) and checks that it got the
expected outcome. Trek then automatically generates self-checking of
directed test cases.
So by keeping track of what paths through the graph have been traversed, the
engineer can collect information about how much of the functional intent of
the design has been exercised.
- Adnan Hamid
Breker Verification Systems, Inc. Austin, TX
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