The UML sequence diagram shows components and the interactions between these components in their temporal, sequential order. Although UML’s primary use has been to document a program or system, you ...

SystemVerilog was supposed to be such a boon to verification engineers. By providing a Verilog-like language with extensions that made it easy to write transactors, assertions, and checkers, the ...

Figure 4 - A SystemVerilog environment for Ethernet MAC. The assertions are shown in blue and can be used to identify specific conditions that are of interest. The testbench components are in green ...

The SystemVerilog language, or IEEE Std 1800-2005, was conceived to address this issue. It’s chock-full of extensions and enhancements that are intended to tackle the verification bottleneck.

Writing test benches in System Verilog can be done the same way as in Verilog, but you don’t get any of the benefits of System Verilog by doing that. System Verilog adds functional coverage—an ...