Accellera Systems Initiative Rolls Out the Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard (UCIS)

New standard takes step towards interoperability of verification coverage data across multiple tools and vendors

SAN FRANCISCO -- June 4, 2012 -- Accellera Systems Initiative is pleased to announce the official debut of the Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard (UCIS) version 1.0 at the 2012 Design Automation Conference (DAC). UCIS is a first step towards the creation of an application interface (API) that allows for interoperability of verification coverage data across multiple tools from multiple vendors. With the growing complexity of chip design, coverage metrics are critical to measuring and guiding design verification. UCIS offers chip designers a standardized way to model and access information among different tools to achieve full verification closure.

The specification of the UCIS 1.0 is available for download at http://www.accellera.org/downloads/standards/. Beginning immediately, companies, universities, and research organizations worldwide can freely access the standard and develop applications for UCIS-based tools and technologies.

The result of years of dedicated work from both electronic design automation (EDA) vendors and members of the design community, UCIS allows users to write their own applications, to access information, and to analyze, grade, merge and report coverage from one or more databases from one or more tool vendors. The standard is built on an API and an XML-based interchange format, which provides a path to exchange coverage databases without requiring a common code library between tools and vendors.

“I would like to congratulate the UCIS co-chairs and committee for their hard work in developing a greatly needed, collaborative standard for verification coverage,” said Shishpal Rawat, chair of Accellera Systems Initiative. “UCIS will enable a common understanding of verification coverage and allow the EDA industry to innovate and help achieve high levels of the same. We anticipate that the standard will help boost engineering productivity through an emerging ecosystem of training, services, tools and new methods.”

The growing complexity of designs mandates that coverage data be shared among different tools to achieve full verification closure. The UCIS coverage database (UCISDB) is conceptually a single repository of all coverage data from all verification processes. It is designed to operate across a variety of tools including software simulators, hardware accelerators, symbolic simulations, formal tools and custom verification tools. As verification and analysis technologies improve, the database implementation may also change, but the standardized API and the interchange format are intended to operate together, regardless of such changes.

For design teams, productivity improvements are intended to be realized via the API and interchange format within applications and scripts. A verification environment can then implement functions that consume coverage data such as producing reports, annotating the design, merging coverage data, ranking tests, and updating verification plans.

To facilitate the sharing of applications and scripts that utilize UCIS, Accellera Systems Initiative will host an open source repository where engineers and companies can make contributions to be shared with the community, improving the usefulness and benefits of UCIS. Find out more at http://www.accellera.org/activities/committees/ucis.

An industry quote sheet in support of the UCIS is available at http://www.accellera.org/news/pressreleases/. In addition, Accellera Systems Initiative has just released a technical tutorial, “An Introduction to the Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard,” which was presented by the UCIS Technical Committee co-chairs at the 2012 Design and Verification Conference. The tutorial is available online at no cost to the worldwide design community: http://www.accellera.org/news/videos/ucisintro/.

Attendees of DAC are invited to a luncheon on June 6 in San Francisco, Calif. for an introduction of UCIS 1.0. Dr. Richard Ho, co-chair of the UCIS Technical Committee, will present an overview of the standard and how users plan to utilize it to enhance their verification flows. Register for the lunch and find out more at http://www.accellera.org/news/events/.

About Accellera Systems Initiative

Accellera Systems Initiative is an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to create, support, promote and advance system-level design, modeling and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry. The organization accelerates standards development, and as part of its ongoing partnership with the IEEE, its standards are contributed to the IEEE Standards Association for formal standardization and ongoing change control. For more information, please visit www.accellera.org. For membership information, please email membership@accellera.org.

Contact Accellera Fill out this form for contacting a Accellera representative. Your Name: Your E-mail address: Your Company address: Your Phone Number: Write your message: