Tuesday 12 February 2008

By default MAIN sequence is not empty

By default, body method of MAIN sequence is not empty. It contains a loop which executes random number of times creating the sequence field (randomly unless constrained). The generated/created driver contains an instance of the MAIN sequence, which is started automatically upon run().

So, in your environment, if body method of MAIN sequence of any eVC is not made empty, it will start executing some random sequences at 0 simulation time. This might have adverse effect on the behavior of the stimulus given to the design if you are using virtual sequence, because user defined sequence (executed inside virutal sequence) and MAIN sequence might be running parallely and might be driving same signals and causing undesirable stimulus.

Debugging this will become difficult. You might be wondering why some other sequences are being executed even though you are calling perticular sequence only in virtual sequence?

So, if you are an eVC developer, always provide sequence library with body of MAIN sequence made empty. And if you are verifying any DUT and if you are using virtual sequence and not using MAIN sequence of any eVC, make body method of all MAIN sequences empty.

Take a look at this e code to check that how MAIN sequence is executing a loop which creates and executes the random sequence. Load this e code and give test command with random seed. You will see that even though body method of MAIN sequence is not extended, MAIN sequence is executing random sequneces (TEST1, TEST2, SIMPLE).

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is exact and this is very confusing. Cadence should at least make the erm library not crypted for us to understand what happens in our code...

Anonymous said...

and what about a virtual sequence calling an other virtual sequence

if you hook the latest's driver to the first's , you have those "adverse effect" . but if you empty the body of the latest virtual sequence, its driver is said to be NULL whereas you see it in the data browser .

Do you know how to dolve this issue ?