Principles of Functional Verification

Rating:
Summary: Explaining why
Review: Instead of attempting to teach you the "howtos" of functional verification this book teaches you the "whys". This causes it to be much less like a textbook than many others on the same subject. Therefore reading this book cover to cover is relatively easy and useful. Examples given are at the appropriate level of complexity - neither too simple nor too complex.

Readers of this book could easily range from senior management to test coders. Senior management would learn the purposes behind various aspects of functional verification and why the cost and complexity continues to rise. Engineers would be exposed to the reasoning behind the use of some functional verification techniques.

Each chapter discusses the ideas behind some aspects of functional verification with examples of how this might be used in an actual system being verified. There are few code examples since that would not contribute to the purpose of the book. The examples are primarily system architectures and how a specific component of functional verification would be used in testing that architecture.

The list of subjects covered is complete relative to the current state of the art.

Overall this is a very useful book to read. I would suggest that most verification engineers and their managers would benefit from exposure to this book. Even if you know all of this already it is a good book to have available to explain to other people what you are doing.

Rating:
Summary: Explaining why
Review: Instead of attempting to teach you the "howtos" of functional verification this book teaches you the "whys". This causes it to be much less like a textbook than many others on the same subject. Therefore reading this book cover to cover is relatively easy and useful. Examples given are at the appropriate level of complexity - neither too simple nor too complex.

Readers of this book could easily range from senior management to test coders. Senior management would learn the purposes behind various aspects of functional verification and why the cost and complexity continues to rise. Engineers would be exposed to the reasoning behind the use of some functional verification techniques.

Each chapter discusses the ideas behind some aspects of functional verification with examples of how this might be used in an actual system being verified. There are few code examples since that would not contribute to the purpose of the book. The examples are primarily system architectures and how a specific component of functional verification would be used in testing that architecture.

The list of subjects covered is complete relative to the current state of the art.

Overall this is a very useful book to read. I would suggest that most verification engineers and their managers would benefit from exposure to this book. Even if you know all of this already it is a good book to have available to explain to other people what you are doing.

Rating:
Summary: a must read for Advanced Verification engineers
Review: Meyer jumps to the heart of advanced verification issues. I have 12 years experience in functional verification and this book provides good information about all the advanced verification topics haunting designers of SoCs today, like, verification reuse, coverage, assertions, testbench development, etc. We bought one for everyone in our group.

Rating:
Summary: a must read for Advanced Verification engineers
Review: Meyer jumps to the heart of advanced verification issues. I have 12 years experience in functional verification and this book provides good information about all the advanced verification topics haunting designers of SoCs today, like, verification reuse, coverage, assertions, testbench development, etc. We bought one for everyone in our group.

Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to ASIC/SoC functional verification
Review: Meyer's book starts with basic concepts of functional verification and gradually introduces you to more advanced topics such as constrained random testing and hardware/software co-simulation techniques. This is a very good book for design engineers and project managers who would like to quickly get up-to-speed on ASIC/SoC functional verification concepts and advanced techniques. For experienced ASIC/SoC verification engineers, this is a good book to refresh your memory on the topic.