vManager: the core of verification

This passage gives the impression that it was written recently, but it is actually quoted from a 2005 Cadence article published in EETimes. As Alphonse Karr said during Les Guêpes, "Nothing changes without its roots."

Having said that, a lot has certainly changed in the field of verification. In 2005, there was no portable stimulus standard (PSS), and formal verification was still in its infancy. If you want to do hardware simulation, it will take several months to start the design. If you want to use FPGA for prototyping, you first have to buy some FPGA. At that time, RTL simulation was the same as now, taking on the main work of verification. In practice, the verification engineer's job mainly consists of manually launching simulations and then analyzing the results. But a better approach had already emerged, namely the first version of vManager released after Cadence acquired Verisity in 2005, although it only supported a single user at that time.

One change that has certainly occurred since 2005, or more accurately, since 1985, is the continued increase in the size of designs. In the early morning when the author wrote this article, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang released the latest AI chip with 54 billion transistors in his kitchen. Larger chips not only mean that the verification engine needs to continuously improve its ability to handle larger designs, but also means that the tools for coordinating the entire verification process must also increase. The Cadence vManager verification management platform has evolved from its original single user to now supporting all users of multinational enterprises.

As mentioned before, the vManager platform was originally developed to support a single location, a single team. The way companies are run today is very different from how they were then. Multiple projects in various design stages are running simultaneously, design teams are distributed around the world, and much verification is done on large server arrays or in the cloud. In the 15 years since it was a single user, the vManager platform has undergone many changes. This article will not go into details. Let’s take a look at the current vManager directly.

Today, the high-availability version of the vManager platform is already used by enterprises for concurrent management of multiple projects, as shown in the figure above.

At the same time, vManager supports the handling of distributed problems such as common server or network failures among work teams in different regions, ensuring the synchronization of key data, maintaining sufficient localization to maintain high performance, and further extending to cloud task management. These features of vManager make it a truly enterprise-class solution.

The vManager platform automates all the above tasks. There are many details behind what is listed, for example in requesting server array resources, queuing tasks for available resources often takes more than 1 / 3 of the verification time. To make matters worse, the longest-running tasks also have the longest delays (because they require more resources and are in short supply). Cost and running time are also related to different server configurations, making the optimization of the distribution of verification tasks in complex verification environments more cumbersome than before.

The second enterprise-grade feature of the vManager platform is to connect verification with requirements management systems such as DOORS (from IBM), REQTIFY (from Dassault) or Jama, which is very important for the automotive, aerospace and defense fields. For large projects, this feature can better realize system-wide requirement capture and traceability. The vManager platform binds and provides feedback on verification and requirements for specific functions through these connections.