Cadence uses SQL to boost verification manager capacity
Cadence Design Systems has rewritten the core of its verification-management environment to work with a database back-end rather than text files to improve the visibility that engineers can get from verification metrics.
Rewritten in Java rather than the e code used for its predecessor, Incisive vManager tracks the progress of verification in a project, using emulation, simulation and formal technologies as sources of coverage data. This is in contrast to the earlier tool – Incisive Enterprise Manager – which focused on simulation, according to John Brennan, product manager for metric-driven verification.
The biggest changes lies in the use of a SQL database back-end to store data rather than text files, which should provide better results for teams of engineers. Brennan said: “The tools out there today are single-user based. They are not designed for collaboration.”
To deal with the problem of accessing verification coverage data from different parts of the project, customers would develop their own SQL-based systems to parse the data provided by the older verification-management tools and store it. By bringing that support into the vManager software itself, Cadence aims to simplify deployment of metric-based verification across large, geographically dispersed teams.
Cadence has implemented the system using PostGreSQL because of its relative popularity among database users and because it allows for the use of Embedded SQL, such that queries can be made from within compiled-code languages such as C/C++. However, vManager is not tied to that particular database. Using the database, Brennan said the system could manage terabytes of data, support an unlimited number of regressions and provide faster merges with fewer compute resources than with text-based retrieval.
The company has developed import tools to allow existing verification databases to be brought into vManager. “It’s a fairly automated one-time import,” Brennan said.