Blog: A snake in the computer

We are entering an interesting period…
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As you may have read in Adam Wilson’s recent blog, “The Summer is coming”, we are heading into the European summer shutdown. It starts in the Scandinavian countries and rolls south. Adam assures me he really is not jealous, but for the engineers in the FirstEDA centre of technical excellence, the summer holiday period brings both challenges and opportunities. The first challenge is ensuring we do not all take holidays at the same time! We need to keep the office staffed for those customers who are still working…

This quieter time provides the technical team an opportunity to update skills, to improve our demonstrations, or even learn a new language. This summer I am planning to do a deep dive into VUnit, which is an open-source unit testing framework for VHDL and SystemVerilog. As VUnit uses Python for its test runner, I hope to learn a bit more of that too. Now, Python was the first hurdle, as it was already installed on my machine, but was quite an old version so an update was needed. I was surprised to find that if I deleted the old Python installation and then typed Python in a command window, the Windows Store pops up. One click and Python 3.8 is installed on my machine.

As you may be aware, VUnit utilises OSVVM for randomisation. So, the next task I had was to update my installation of OSVVM for Riviera-PRO. This was a simple task of downloading the latest OSVVM release from GitHub and running a script after making the pre-installed library writable. So now I am prepared, time to line up some test cases and read some documentation.

For those of you who want to update your OSVVM library in Aldec’s Riviera-PRO, I have written a technical article on how to do this, which you can get by clicking here. If you are new to RTL verification and want to get the heads up on why you should be doing it, have a look at this YouTube playlist which will also give you some information on OSVVM. Finally, if you have some spare time or want to learn more about VHDL or Verification with OSVVM? Why not enrol on one of our live instructor-led online training courses?

Well, that’s all from me now, keep safe and enjoy your summer, be that fighting snakes or laying on the beach.