It is the year 2014. We live in a highly mobile, wireless world, supported by cloud and associated network infrastructure. Therefore, the use of physical media, such as CDs, DVDs, BlueRay discs, and so on are fading quickly.
Personally, because of the early adopter in me, I despise the use of physical media in this day and age. The few interactions I still have with it are limited to the use of CDs in my car, as the aux input connection is electrically noisy, and the Bluetooth interface does not support my smartphone for some reason. Mind you, my car is a model that is at the end of its lifecycle. This means the engineering for it was developed many years earlier. The average automobile development cycle is about 7 years, and mine was originally released in 2003. Hence, in the worst-case scenario, the audio system was selected and developed around 1996. Most likely it was updated in model years thereafter. However, it would make sense that for my model, besides the FM/AM radio, the main audio source is Audio/MP3 CD.
A few weeks ago, the following song popped into my head: "Pretty fly (for a White Guy)" by The Offspring, which is some sort of Punk-Rock-Pop song that was popular in 1998. It is a pretty funny song. I bought it and my kids started to love it. This meant that they demanded I play it in the car for them.
(Please visit the site to view this video)
So, I had to burn a CD. I have not done that in years and was surprised that I even still had writable CDs in the house.
I burned the CD with one other song just a few minutes before I drove my kids to a soccer game. In the rush, I did not add more songs to the playlist to complement "Pretty Fly", so we had to listen to the two songs over and over again. Eventually, I got sick of it. Hence, I used the genius feature in Apple's iTunes to create a more interesting and longer playlist. Then I burned a new CD with about 15 songs. Fifteen songs are good, but even that will also get stale sooner or later.
Why don't I go ahead and burn even more songs on a disk, you may ask? Hey, I could make an MP3 CD, which has far greater storage capacity that the old audio CD format. And if I recall correctly, my car's disk player does support the MP3 audio format, whichispretty exciting to me! So, I burned a disk with about 150 songs.
I could not wait to put the MP3 disk into the car's disk drive and check if it worked. Unfortunately it did not! Hence I could not fight the staleness factor yet. Even worse, I could not expose my kids to more gems of '90s or dare I say '80s and '70s music ;) But then I ran into a store and they had a nice 3.5mm to 3.5mm standard mini jack cable. In a moment of clarity I thought, maybe the aux noise is from the cable I have. And indeed that was the case. Obviously I should have debugged this years ago.
The point I am making is this: We all use tools and devices that have features that we kind of know about, but are not fully aware of, or have never used.
The same is true, of course, for verification in general, and Incisive in particular. When we talk to Incisive users, we often see the following interaction taking place:
Application Engineer: "Did you try feature X yet?"
Customer: "Never heard of it." (Or they have heard of it, but never used it)!
Application Engineer: "Feature X provides the following functionality and could be used in the following way."
Customer (tries feature X): "This is great stuff. I cannot believe I missed out on this for so long."
In order to give you a whole set of features that you might not have used yet, I have collaborated with other members of the Incisive Application Engineering, Product Expert, and R&D team to compile a list of 10 features likely to be unknown by many Incisive users.
1. Waveform database probing with -event: Debug race conditions related to event ordering.
2. Design file search: Find files associated with your debug session quickly.
3. iprof (Incisive Performance Profiling):The ability to perform Advanced Profiling for SystemVerilog, UVM, RTL, GLS.
4. nchelp/ncbrowse: Two utilities to help you get more details about Error or Warning messages, combined with a browser to make message analysis easier.
5. IEEE 1801 (aka UPF) Power Supply Network Browser: The easy way to debug your UPF power supply network.
6. Quick diff in the waveform viewer: A fast way to detect unexpected signal differences.
7. UVM Sequence Viewer: Making sense of UVM sequences and their hierarchy.
8. Cloning of SystemVerilog randomization calls: Ability to extract the relevant code related to a randomization call.
9. Test Case Optimizer: Trimming down a testcase to a small fraction of it size to recreate an issue: Error, Warning etc.
10. Automated Transaction recording and viewing for UVM: Quickly turn UVM sequence activity in visual transactions.
We will release specific posts for all of these features in the upcoming weeks.
By the way, I disagree with the line in the song "the world loves wanabees." It might have been meant in an ironic way, but the world loves the real deal.
Keep on discovering unknown features!
Axel Scherer
Chief Fly Guy