Draft Standard That Unifies IEEE Verilog™ And SystemVerilog™ Standards Now Available

Piscataway, NJ - The IEEE P1800 Working Group has created a unified draft that combines the complementary IEEE SystemVerilog™ and Verilog™ hardware design language standards into a single document. The draft standard, IEEE P1800™, "SystemVerilog Standard: Unified Hardware Design, Specification and Verification Language," is available for a nominal fee.

"The merging of the IEEE 1364 Verilog and IEEE 1800 SystemVerilog manuals creates a single reference document for users in the electronic design automation, semiconductor and system design communities, as well as EDA vendors," said Karen Pieper, chair of the 1800 Working Group and research and development director at Synopsys. "Reaching this milestone in just five months took a lot of hard work. I'd like to recognize the working group and its editor, Stu Sutherland, for achieving so much in such a short time."

The IEEE 1800 SystemVerilog standard was created to enable the use of a unified language for abstract and detailed specification of the design, specification of assertions, coverage, and test bench verification based on manual or automatic methodologies. It was developed on top of IEEE 1364 to augment the Verilog language standard. It also offers application programming interfaces (APIs) for coverage and assertions, a vendor-independent API to access proprietary waveform file formats, and a direct programming interface to access proprietary functionality.

Further enhancements to the draft standard will improve the usability of the joint hardware design and verification language and resolve and clarify errata. The new standard will also enable interoperability with existing languages, such as VHDL and SystemC, and provide for integration with analog mixed signals (AMS).

IEEE P1800 is being developed within the IEEE Corporate Standards Program. It is spo nsored by the Design Automation Standards Committee of the IEEE Computer Society and by the Corporate Advisory Group, which guides the IEEE Corporate Standards Program. Entities interested in helping to develop this standard are invited to participate in the IEEE P1800 Working Group.

SOURCE: IEEE