Ninja ASIC Verification

On my never ending quest to find the utlimate language for ASIC Verification, I decided to learn DigitalMars D. Yes, it’s called D, as in A, B, C, C++, D. It is a compiled, object-oriented, garbage collected programming language which runs as fast as C/C++, without the hassles of C/C++ and without the verbosity of Java.

So I picked up a bit of D on my spare time, and then a book came out, Learn to Tango with D. D is the language, Tango is a systems library. My main worry about the book was that I am not a Java, nor a C/C++ programmer. But to undertstand the book, you do not need to know C/C++ or Java. The authors take the time to explain the concepts as they apply to D, which is really great. Most of the book is about D, and that’s perfect for me. Starting from chapter 6 is where the authors present the packages of the Tango library.

If you want to learn D, you could read the D manual, but it would be like reading a dictionary: long and dry. To me reading the online D manual was not enough, because there were things that I did not understand, such as the imports of modules, the use of the static keyword (what it really does), procedural lifetimes, and some intricate details of templates. All those and more are explained in the the book. The book also does a great job at explaining arrays. Arrays in D are awesome, and go above and beyond what you find in Vera. For instance, D dynamic arrays support slicing, which means you can have multiple references to the same data in memory, or portions of that data. Isn’t this great? Imagine how this could simplify and speed up nested packing/unpacking of data structures: your data would not move in the computer memory!

So can D be used for ASIC Verification? Well, you’d need a few things, such as threading and fixed sized integers, aka bit vectors of arbitrary size. The Tango library has Threads and Fibers, and with Fibers you can build coroutines, and with coroutines, you can build a simulator with mailboxes, semaphores, mutexes, etc. The first time I saw a demonstration that a simulator could be built with coroutines was in MyHDL but I am sure there are others. So I have no doubt a HVL simulator can be built with Tango Fibers. Tango also has a nice Logger package, meaning you don’t have to invent one.

As D is not an HDL, it does not have assertions. Ideally, you’d also want a constraint solver, a constraint language, and something for functional coverage too. That’s a lot of things to be added before D can be used for ASIC Verification.

Nevertheless, D is great and I definitely recommend the book if you want to learn D and the important packages of the Tango library. The book has many code examples which greatly help understand the concepts.