Special session - What’s so intelligent about testbenches?

Functional verification is one of the main bottlenecks of the hardware design process and its complexity and demands are growing in an even faster pace than design complexity. Many technologies and methodologies that improve the quality of the verification process and the productivity of the verification team have been developed and successfully deployed throughout the years. Random stimuli generation is certainly one of the main advances in the field of functional verification. The shift from manually created test cases to machine generated stimuli helped automating many aspects of the verification process, replacing expensive and scarce human experts with readily available compute power.