Alan Feldstein's Blog

For a long time, I thought Verification Engineers were smarter than Logic Designers. After all, we Verification Engineers could see their mistakes, each one nourishing the image of a group of people that we probably shouldn't be looking up to. And what happens when we debug the design under verification down to the offending line of HDL code? We report the issue along with the source file name and line number. The Logic Designer then types in the correction. It's a lot like dictation.



But seriously, I've been doing a lot of logic design lately and I can tell you from firsthand experience that it's not easy. In my opinion, Logic Designers are worthy of our respect and admiration after all.

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First of all, congratulations to the OpenSPARC Community Innovation Award winners.

I find the research of Kushal Datta particularly interesting. He is developing CASPER, a parameterized cycle-accurate simulator that allows the user to vary a number of microarchitectural parameters in OpenSPARC T1 for performance analysis.

Meanwhile, developers working in the industry, such as those at Cosmic Horizon, endeavor to make it easier for people to engage in development on OpenSPARC.

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I said last time that "things will be picking up dramatically". I'm pretty satisfied with recent progress, which I detail in this blog item, along with my thoughts on what comes next after release of FSS Version_0-007.

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The fastest microprocessor in the world is now a SPARC, according to a test result published this month ...

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Now that I've returned from the consulting assignment in Boston, and I've left behind the Windows XP laptop on which I was attempting to develop software, life is good once again. I'm back on my beloved Solaris 10, and I have almost nothing to report regarding progress with Icarus Verilog and Free Netlist Format (FNF).

But I did say "almost" ...

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My contract in Boston had been extended again through 2008-09-30, but on 2008-06-23 I learned that, for business reasons, it would end much sooner. It then ended 2008-06-27!

I put a lot of energy into that consulting assignment. It was supposed to last three months, but lasted eight. As a result, Cosmic Horizon slowed. But it did not stop. In this blog item, I will discuss recent progress.

Now that I'm free, things will be picking up dramatically. Of course, if someone hires me, Cosmic Horizon will slow again. After all, I have to eat ...

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Suppose that you want OpenSPARC compiling under Icarus Verilog. I've been working on that (although the intensity of my efforts on this particular project will increase when Sun's stock price rises).

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I just want to compile a simple one-file program, so naturally I thought of javac first. But with the NetBeans Blogging Contest on, I thought I'd take a look at how NetBeans IDE 6.1 Beta simplifies the task ...

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I'm in a corporate furnished apartment, where the Internet and cable TV service are provided by Comcast. Actually, as far as I'm concerned, those services are provided by the property owner, whom I pay to be here. How the property owner provides Internet and cable TV to me is not my concern, but is the owner's responsibility.

Not long ago, I received a paper bill from Comcast in the apartment mailbox and a threatening telephone message from Comcast on the telephone in the apartment (another service provided by the property owner). I can't remember which happened first. As a courtesy to Comcast, I returned the telephone call, providing Comcast with contact information for the responsible party. Comcast was not receptive to that information, but I told them that I would not be nice about it if they were to contact me again. I told them that, not only would I never be a Comcast customer, but that you wouldn't be either ...

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I modified the interface to Class A's only constructor, increasing the length of it's argument list from two to three. Class B instantiates Class A (i.e. B depends on A), still calling it's constructor with only two arguments. Since Class A changed, NetBeans IDE 6.1 should have recompiled Class B and found the fault in its Class A constructor call. However, there was no failure until run time.

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