In a prior Team Verify post, Application Engineer Bin Ju talked about several applications of "Assertion Driven Simulation (ADS) in the Wild". In the following tech tip, allow me (Chris Komar, right) to focus on a common thread through each of her stories: the need to quickly bring-up a design without having to write any throw-away RTL code. One neat trick that supports this is a handy capability in Incisive Formal and Enterprise Verifier tools ("IFV" and "IEV") nicknamed "show me", where you can set up the tool to click on a signal in the source code viewer, and then have the tool display a cover witness trace for it.
Specifically, you can quickly select a signal in your DUT and ask IFV/IEV to show the signal becoming active. Thus, instead of having to write a testbench and figure out the proper stimulus to assert the signal, you just ask IFV/IEV to show you it going active -- hence the "show me" nickname.
Without exception, every customer that I've introduced this "show me" trick to wants to use this feature, and ideally automate its operation. Hence, here is how you can map this capability to its own button on the IFV/IEV GUI for quick access.
1 - Right click in the blank space of toolbar of the IFV/IEV window to open a pop-up menu to modify the toolbar settings. Then click the "Customize" button in the pop menu to bring up the "Customize Toolbars" dialog box.
2 - In the "Customize Toolbars" dialog box that appears, click "New Toolbar" to create a user defined toolbar called "User Toolbar", then click "New Button" to open the "Create a New Button" window.
3 - In "Edit a Button" window, configure and input the Tcl script as the following figure and click "OK", which will create a new user button called "Witness Signal" in the IFV/IEV window.
4 - Next, go back and bring-up the source code browser to select a signal, then click on your new button to have IFV/IEV show a waveform that asserts that signal (which in effect utilizes the dynamic/interactive property creation via Tcl). This waveform will honor the constraints defined by your assertion.
Happy "Showing"!
Chris Komar
for Team Verify
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/teamverify, @teamverify