Transferred from IEEE P1076 WG Collected Requirements list: RandomStimulus

Randomization Stimulus Generation.

Stable randomization requires separate seeds.

• Complexity
• Timeliness since SystemVerilog, 'e', … already have solutions
• Constrained random stimulus has coverage closure issues
• Industry is already moving past language based constrained random solutions

Randomized stimulus is an important feature that requires an immediate solution. The Open Source VHDL Verification Methodology (OSVVM) project has implemented a package, RandomPkg, that provides some basic randomization capability. When combined with code, this capability can provide a reasonable quality randomization.

The OSVVM package does not have a constraint solver, so there are some limitiations when multiple separate constraints need to be solved together. As a result, it is prudent to consider what should be done to improve the quality of the randomization. Options include: provide a solution with a constraint solver or pursue and supplement OSVVM's “Intelligent Coverage”. See Functional Coverage.

While creating a solution with a constraint solver will give VHDL parity with SystemVerilog and 'e', it will leave us with the same problems. Best case though, a constrained random approach will require O( N * Log N) iterations to randomly generate N test cases. This would be a costly approach alternative in terms of implementation costs.

Industry leaders have suggested that Intelligent Testbenches are the future. OSVVM's “Intelligent Coverage” methodology provides an Intelligent testbench solution. We need to investigate if this is sufficient, if language changes will make it sufficient, or if we need a constraint solver to handle some cases.

The OSVVM packages are available here.
Latest packages: github.com/JimLewis/OSVVM

Intelligent coverage methodology handles mapping input coverage to input stimulus real well. The question is will it handle mapping internal or output coverage to input stimulus?

For expediency, can we leverage an existing solver and supplement the package based approach? How do we pass constraints to a solver? Are language enhancements needed to facilitate this? How do we blend this in with Intelligent Coverage?

For some ideas, this is the old randomization document written during the VHDL-2008 effort. It is old and out of date with respect to the current randomization packages. Old Coverage and Randomization doc

For now, see the documentation that accompanies the open-source packages.

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