FW: Presentation on constraint solving

[Ken Sailor <Ken_Sailor@pmc-sierra.com>]

Just to get this into our email thread.  I'm travelling for most of the month and will be in and out of contact.

1. I like your proposal.

2. We need to debated the generation engine.  I cannot believe that Versity is willing to publicize the engine, and that any company building e will have proprietary IP related to generation.  I suspect the best we can do is come up with a statement of properties we expect of generation: randomness, completeness, etc.

I understand this means that a move from one tool to another means different simulations - e.g. trigger a bug on an emulator and move to a simulator for better debug - and different stimulus means you don't see the bug.  But maybe there are workarounds, like generation of VCDs or something to bypass generation.

Ken

Further thoughts?

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Macionski [mailto:chris@brighteyesconsulting.com]
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 3:44 PM
To: Ken Sailor
Subject: Re: Presentation on constraint solving


Ken

I am sending you an email to follow up our discussion on constraints 
and generation.  I think there should be 2 changes made:

1) Varaibles/data fields should be allowed in range constraints.  Right 
now,

keep dat_field in [0..max] ;

is not allowed.  The work around is:

keep dat_field >= 0;
keep dat_field <= max;

It is a work around, but sloppy.  I think it should be changed.  WHat 
are your thoughts on this?

2) The generation engine needs to be documented.  It is essential that 
I get the same results if I run code on 2 different simulators.  An 
example of when I may do this is if I am using e to drive a emulator.  
The emulator finds a problem.  So I when go back to my software 
simulator to reproduce and debug the problem, I need it to act the same 
way.  This was a problem with Verilog (using $random) and it had to be 
fixed in Verilog 2k.

What do you think?

Chris


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