It would be great if you could help me in understanding how randomization works in UVM and what factors affect it apart from ntb_random_seed . I am observing a testcase which is using same ntb_random_seed is following different randomization only with the addition of display macros. Is it possible? I hope my question is clear. Let me know, if you need additional information.
You need to read the 1800-2012 LRM section 18.14 on random stability. It lists the possible causes of instability. Older versions of the UVM had problems with the display macros, especially if you used things like the report catcher.
Related
we are working on a project to come up with an intermediate representation for the code in terms of something called an assignment decision diagram. So it would be very helpful if someone can tell us how you guys are compiling the code and how to access the graphs generated during compilation i.e after parsing the code for grammar.
Even help regarding accessing the code after parsing of the compiler is fine. Any help regarding how to go about doing it is also appreciated.
Currently, there is not a well defined intermediate representation of Chisel as it goes between the user source code and the specified C++ or Verilog backends.
However, I believe this is a current project amongst the Chisel devs to break apart the backend and allow access to the IR (and allow for user-defined compiler passes).
In the meantime, check out Backend.scala (particularly the elaborate() method). That's where a lot of the magic originates. I believe it is possible to jump into the Scala command line in the middle of elaboration, which will give you access to the hardware tree representation, but I'm not sure how meaningful or useful that will be for you.
I've started learning evolutionary algorithms (GA, PSO, ...) and I want to implement them in Matlab and play with different parameters to get a hold of the algorithms' structures and how they work.
My problem is, I don't have some simple test functions to use. For example, functions with multiple peaks/valleys, one global minimum and multiple local ones, .... Nothing complicated, just some simple mathematical functions with their formulas.
I can try to make some up with putting some sin/cos/exp together, but it'll take time and is really frustrating!
Anybody knows of a resource (site, book, ...) that have these listed?
Here is a set from our very own #Rody Oldenhuis:
Test functions
You might want to try those in the BBOB benchmark set. There is also some nice accompanying literature to this set in form of the corresponding GECCO workshop.
Some of the classic functions were mentioned by AGS already and include Rastrigin, Rosenbrock and Generalized Rosenbrock, Schwefel, Sphere, Griewank, etc.. We have also implemented these and more in HeuristicLab, so if you want to experiment you can also try that (PSO and GA are included also).
A friend of mine needs to implement some statistical calculations in hardware.
She wants it to be accomplished using VHDL.
(cross my heart, I haven't written a line of code in VHDL and know nothing about its subtleties)
In particular, she needs a direct analogue of MATLAB's betainc function.
Is there a good package around for doing this?
Any hints on the implementation are also highly appreciated.
If it's not a good idea at all, please tell me about it as well.
Thanks a lot!
There isn't a core available that performs an incomplete beta function in the Xilinx toolset. I can't speak for the other toolsets available, although I would doubt that there is such a thing.
What Xilinx does offer is a set of signal processing blocks, like multipliers, adders and RAM Blocks (amongst other things, filters, FFTs), that can be used together to implement various custom signal transforms.
In order for this to be done, there needs to be a complete understanding of the inner workings of the transform to be applied.
A good first step is to implement the function "manually" in matlab as a proof of concept:
Instead of using the built-in function in matlab, your friend can try to implement the function just using fundamental operators like multipliers and adders.
The results can be compared with those produced by the built-in function for verification.
The concept can then be moved to VHDL using the building blocks that are provided.
Doing this for the incomplete beta function isn't something for the faint-hearted, but it can be done.
As far as I know there is no tool which allow interface of VHDL and matlab.
But interface of VHDL and C is fairly easy, so if you can implement your code(MATLAB's betainc function) in C then it can be done easily with FLI(foreign language interface).
If you are using modelsim below link can be helpful.
link
First of all a word of warning, if you haven't done any VHDL/FPGA work before, this is probably not the best place to start. With VHDL (and other HDL languages) you are basically describing hardware, rather than a sequential line of commands to execute on a processor (as you are with C/C++, etc.). You thus need a completely different skill- and mind-set when doing FPGA-development. Just because something can be written in VHDL, it doesn't mean that it actually can work in an FPGA chip (that it is synthesizable).
With that said, Xilinx (one of the major manufacturers of FPGA chips and development tools) does provide the System Generator package, which interfaces with Matlab and can automatically generate code for FPGA chips from this. I haven't used it myself, so I'm not at all sure if it's usable in your friend's case - but it's probably a good place to start.
The System Generator User guide (link is on the previously linked page) also provides a short introduction to FPGA chips in general, and in the context of using it with Matlab.
You COULD write it yourself. However, the incomplete beta function is an integral. For many values of the parameters (as long as both are greater than 1) it is fairly well behaved. However, when either parameter is less than 1, a singularity arises at an endpoint, making the problem a bit nasty. The point is, don't write it yourself unless you have a solid background in numerical analysis.
Anyway, there are surely many versions in C available. Netlib must have something, or look in Numerical Recipes. Or compile it from MATLAB. Then link it in as nav_jan suggests.
As an alternative to VHDL, you could use MyHDL to write and test your beta function - that can produce synthesisable (ie. can go into an FPGA chip) VHDL (or Verilog as you wish) out of the back end.
MyHDL is an extra set of modules on top of Python which allow hardware to be modelled, verified and generated. Python will be a much more familiar environment to write validation code in than VHDL (which is missing many of the abstract data types you might take for granted in a programming language).
The code under test will still have to be written with a "hardware mindset", but that is usually a smaller piece of code than the test environment, so in some ways less hassle than figuring out how to work around the verification limitations of VHDL.
Does anyone know of any examples of code written in prolog to implement a DSL to generate perl code?
DCGs might be an excellent choice!
I have used a similar approach for generation of UML class diagrams (really, graphviz code for such diagrams) from simple English sentences (shameless-plug: paper here). It should be possible to do something similar with generation of Perl code instead.
In the paper above, we use a constraint store (CHR) as intermediate representation which allows some extra reasoning power. Alternatively you can build a representation as an output feature/argument of the DCG.
Note that DCGs can be useful both for the parsing of your sentences and the generation of your Perl code.
Well, not exactly what you are asking for, but maybe you can use AI::Prolog for what you are looking for. That way you may be able to use Perl and generate the Perl code you want.
I'm not sure why you would want to do that?
Perl is a very expressive language, I'm not sure why you'd want to try to generate Perl code from Prolog; in order to make it useful, you'd be getting closer and closer to Perl in your "DSL", by which point you'd be better off just writing some Perl, surely?
I think you need to expand this question a bit to cover what you're trying to achieve in a little more detail.
SWI-Prolog library(http/html_write) library builds on DCG a DSL for page layout.
It shows a well tought model for integrating Prolog and HTML, but doesn't attempt to cover the entire problem. The 'residual logic' on the client side remains underspecified, but this is reasonable, being oriented on practical issues 'reporting' from RDF.
Thus the 'small detail' client interaction logic is handled in a 'black box' fashion, and such demanded to YUI components in the published application (the award winner Cliopatria).
The library it's extensible, but being very detailed, I guess for your task you should eventually reuse just the ideas behind.
I have taken over a large code base and would like to get an overview how and where certain classes and their methods are used.
Is there any good tool that can somehow visualize the dependencies and draw a nice call tree or something similar?
The code is in C++ in Visual Studio if that helps narrow down any selection.
Here are a few options:
CodeDrawer
CC-RIDER
Doxygen
The last one, doxygen, is more of an automatic documentation tool, but it is capable of generating dependency graphs and inheritance diagrams. It's also licensed under the GPL, unlike the first two which are not free.
When I have used Doxygen it has produced a full list of callers and callees. I think you have to turn it on.
David, thanks for the suggestions. I spent the weekend trialing the programs.
Doxygen seems to be the most comprehensive of the 3, but it still leaves some things to be desired in regard to callers of methods.
All 3 seem to have problems with C++ templates to varying degrees. CC-Rider simply crashed in the middle of the analysis and CodeDrawer does not show many of the relationships. Doxygen worked pretty well, but it too did not find and show all relations and instead overwhelmed me with lots of macro references until I filtered them out.
So, maybe I should clarify "large codebase" a bit for eventual other suggestions: >100k lines of code overall spread out over more than 100 template files plus several actual class files pulling it all together.
Any other tools out there, that might be up to the task and could do better (more thoroughly)? Oh and specifically: anything that understands IDL and COM interfaces?
When I have used Doxygen it has produced a full list of callers and callees. I think you have to turn it on.
I did that of course, but like I mentioned, doxygen does not consider interfaces between objects as they are defined in the IDL. It "only" shows direct C++ calls.
Don't get me wrong, it is already amazing what it does, but it is still not complete from my high level view trying to get a good understanding of how everything fits together.
In Java I would start with JDepend. In .NET, with NDepend. Don't know about C++.