1、 IEEE Standard for the Functional Verification Language e Sponsored by the Design Automation Standards Committee IEEE 3 Park Avenue New York, NY 10016-5997 USA IEEE Computer Society IEEE Std 1647-2016(Revision ofIEEE Std 1647-2011) IEEE Std 1647-2016(Revision ofIEEE Std 1647-2011)IEEE Standard for t
2、he Functional Verification Language eSponsorDesign Automation Standards Committeeof theIEEE Computer SocietyApproved 30 June 2016IEEE-SA Standards BoardThe Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.3 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016-5997, USACopyright 2017 by The Institute of Electrical
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32、 standard was submitted to the IEEE-SA Standards Board for approval, theIEEE e Functional Verification Language (eWG) Working Group had the following members andobservers: Darren Galpin, ChairSrinivasan Venkataramanan, Vice ChairAlan Perlman, Karen Ochoa, Amy Witherow, Technical EditorsThe following
33、 members of the individual balloting committee voted on this standard. Balloters may havevoted for approval, disapproval, or abstention. When the IEEE-SA Standards Board approved this standard on 30 June 2016, it had the followingmembership:Jean-Philippe Faure, ChairTed Burse, Vice ChairJohn D. Kuli
34、ck, Past ChairKonstantinos Karachalios, Secretary*Member EmeritusCristian AmitroaieMike BartleyErez BashiStefan BirmanHannes FroehlichKishore KarnaneYaron KashaiSilas McDermottGenadi OsowieckiAndrew PizialiAleksandar RandjicScott RolandDamian SavageUwe SimmAkash SinghMarat TeplitskyYuri TsoglinMatan
35、 VaxGreg WhiteSourav DuttaHannes FroehlichDarren GalpinRandall GrovesWerner HoelzlNoriyuki IkeuchiAdri JovinPiotr KarockiYaron KashaiAdam LeyNick S.A. NikjooBansi PatelAndrew PizialiIulian ProfirRobert RobinsonWalter StrupplerRichard ThayerJohn VergisPaul WorkChuck AdamsMasayuki AriyoshiStephen Duke
36、sJianbin FanRonald W. HotchkissJ. Travis GriffithGary HoffmanMichael Janezic Joseph L. Koepfinger*Hung LingKevin LuGary RobinsonAnnette D. ReillyMehmet UlemaYingli WenHoward WolfmanDon WrightYu YuanDaidi Zhong7Copyright 2017 IEEE. All rights reserved.IntroductionThe e functional verification languag
37、e is an application-specific programming language aimed at theproblem of verifying functional correctness of hardware and software designs. Simply stated, functionalverification attempts to provide a quantitative answer to the question: How well does the design match thefunctional specification?Func
38、tional correctness of chip designs grew in criticality from the mid-1980s. As design complexity keptgrowing, ad hoc testing methods ran out of steam and a more systematic verification approach wasnecessary. Manually constructed test suites, the early method of choice, became both uneconomical andine
39、ffective when scaled up. As a result, many companies supplemented manual test suites withpseudo-random generation of input stimulus. Such test generation programs were typically built for aparticular project or a particular architecture. They turned out to be expensive to develop and maintain, buton
40、ce functional, they would clean up the design in a very thorough way.A key observation made by Yoav Hollander, the creator of e, was that verification environments of differentprojects have a lot in common and yet each verification environment is structured to match a particulardesign specification.
41、 Hollanders solution was to create a language that had verification-specific constructsas primitives and the full capabilities of a high-level language for customization. In particular,pseudo-random test generation became a built-in capability of the language. Early prototypes of thelanguage were ex
42、perimented with as early as 1993, showing significant productivity gains.The e language was productized by Verisity, Ltd., in 1996, as part of a functional verification tool suite. Theproliferation of the e language and the growing investment in e-based intellectual property (IP) compelledthe creati
43、on of the e steering committee in June of 2002, composed of individuals from Texas Instruments,Rambus, ST Microelectronics, Cisco, Intel, Axis System, STARC, and Verisity. The e steering committeerecommended the e language be standardized through The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
44、(IEEE). Accepting the recommendation, Verisity released the rights to the language to the IEEE in June of2003.The e language, in its current form, brings together concepts from many domains. e has a basic object-oriented (OO) programming model, with implicit memory management andsingle inheritance.
45、In this, e is similar to Java.1 Beyond objects, e supports aspects, which can be viewed as layers cutting across multiple objects.Adding an aspect to an existing program refines the program by introducing a coherent change to aplurality of objects. e supports constraints as object features. Constrai
46、nts are used to refine object modeling. Theexecution model of the language involves resolving constraint systems and picking random valuesthat would satisfy constraint systems. e is a strongly typed language, like Pascal and Modula. e has concurrency constructs and modeling blocks for hierarchical c
47、omposition, similar to hardwaredescription languages like Verilog (see IEEE Std 1364) and VHDL (see IEC/IEEE 61691-1-1).1, 2Concurrency in e is synchronous, like in Esterel.1Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Verilog is a registered trademark of C
48、adenceDesign Systems, Inc. This information is given for the convenience of users of this standard and does not constitute an endorsementby the IEEE of these products. Equivalent products may be used if they can be shown to lead to the same results.2Information on references can be found in Clause 2
49、.This introduction is not part of IEEE Std 1647-2016, IEEE Standard for the Functional Verification Language e.8Copyright 2017 IEEE. All rights reserved. e contains a temporal language that borrows from Linear Temporal Logic and Interval TemporalLogic. e has many built-in constructs aimed at simplifying common programming tasks; built-in support forlists and hashes; and pattern matching and string- and file-manipulation features, which areborrowed from Perl.3 The e syntax is extendable with a powerful macro capability.This combination of concepts caters directl
