There are several books about hardware verification, so what makes
this book different? Put simply, this book is meant to be useful in your
day-to-day work—which is why we refer to it throughout as a handbook.
The authors are like you, cube dwellers, with battle scars from developing
chips. We must cope with impossible schedules, a shortage of people to
do the work, and constantly mutating hardware specifications.
We subtitled this book An Object-Oriented Framework because a major
theme of the book is how to use object-oriented programming (OOP) to
do verification well. We focus on real-world examples, bloopers, and
code snippets. Sure, we talk about programming theory, but the theme
of this book is how to write simpler, adaptable, reusable code. We focus
mainly on OOP techniques because we feel that this is the best way to
manage the ever-increasing complexity of verification. We back this up
with open-source Verification Intellectual Property (VIP), several complete
test systems, and scripts to run them.