BEAVERTON, Ore. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — December 19, 2011 — Open Core Protocol International Partnership (OCP-IP) today announced that Cadence Design Systems, Inc., a leader in global electronic design innovation, is the recipient of the annual Outstanding Contributor of the Year Award for 2011. The OCP-IP Governing Steering Committee grants this award each year to a member that makes key contributions to the further advancement of the OCP specification or supporting infrastructure.
The committee specifically acknowledged Gabriele Zarri of Cadence for his leadership, commitment and contributions to OCP-IP’s Functional Verification Working Group (FVWG). Mr. Zarri played a key role in completing development for the latest version of the OCP-IP Compliance Document.
The OCP Compliance document will be released in the first quarter of 2011, and will include Compliance Checks and Functional Coverage. Compliance Checks describe 'legal' constraints for signals on an OCP interface, and eliminate the need for “best guess” verification by engineers, making certain an OCP interface complies with the specification, assuring verification quality and that IP blocks are compatible at the system level.
In addition, these checks define a set of rules for the OCP Specification. Constraints can be as simple as "check that a signal is never 0" or may be complex temporal expressions. If no check is violated by functional and/or formal verification, the logic is proven compliant with the protocol.
The compliance checks can be used in several different ways. Formal tools can use checks to ensure a design never violates them, proving OCP compliance, or they can be used to record the number of times a given restraint was hit. Functional verification tools can use the properties to build protocol checkers (inVerilog/VHDL/E/SystemC, etc.). By applying stimuli to the design under test (DUT) and verifying that protocol checkers are not reporting violations, OCP compliance is verified.
Functional Coverage is a technique to measure the quality of the stimuli generated by a verification test suite. It provides an objective view of the verification space and is used to measure the completeness of the verification of an OCP IP block. Guidelines, developed by the FVWG, eliminate the need for “best guess” verification by engineers, making certain an OCP interface complies with the current specification and ensuring verification quality and IP block compatibility at the system level.
Cadence has leveraged the work of the Functional Verification Working Group in its OCP Verification IP (VIP), including verification of the newest OCP 3.0 version with support for cache coherency.
"We are pleased to be named Contributor of the Year by the OCP-IP," said Erik Panu, vice president of VIP R&D for Cadence. "Working with other leading companies in the OCP-IP community, we are creating standard interfaces that are critical for the next generation of heterogeneous processor, multi-core products while simultaneously delivering the tools needed to bring the standard to market more quickly.”
Work on the Compliance Document was executed by members of the OCP-IP Functional Verification Working Group including: Cadence, MIPS, Sonics Inc, and Texas Instruments along with other industry-leading companies.
Companies wishing to participate in the OCP-IP Functional Verification Working Group are invited to contact Email Contact
“The work of the Functional Verification Working Group is an excellent example of the productive cooperation we routinely achieve between member companies. We are grateful for the tremendous effort and contributions provided by Gabriele Zarri and Cadence, and we thank them for their efforts,” said Ian Mackintosh, president OCP-IP. “We are pleased to present them with the 2011 Outstanding Contributor Award and look forward to their continued partnership in the future.”
For the latest information about OCP-IP please see our newsletter at http://www.ocpip.org/newsletters.php
About OCP-IP
Formed in 2001, OCP-IP is a non-profit corporation promoting, supporting and delivering the only openly licensed, core-centric protocol comprehensively fulfilling integration requirements of heterogeneous multicore systems. The Open Core Protocol (OCP) facilitates IP core reusability and reduces design time, risk, and manufacturing costs for all SoC and electronic designs by providing a comprehensive supporting infrastructure. For additional background and membership information, visit www.OCPIP.org.
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