Seeking opinions on new ModelSim analysis features

Newsletter · Original Contribution Joined: Dec 08, 2003 Posts: 1107

(Originally from Issue 1.3, Item 4.0)

From: David Ehlers

How effective/useful are the performance analyzer and
code coverage tools in ModelSim/SE? Any experiences
or comments?

Newsletter · Original Contribution Joined: Dec 08, 2003 Posts: 1107

(Originally from Issue 1.4, Item 4.0)

From: Alain Raynaud

MTI v5.3 introduced two new features: code coverage, and code
profiler.

They work great! The code profiler is really efficient into pointing
out which lines or sections of your code are spending the most
time. With it, you very quickly identify where simulation time is
spent, and it therefore becomes much easier to improve it. Instead of
wasting time optimizing different potential areas, you identify first
which ones are worth working on.

The code coverage tool is more limited: it only does simple line
coverage. In our case, this is clearly not enough, so we don't really
use it. My guess is that since the MTI engineers were going to
implement code analysis, they added "toy" code coverage since it was
basically no additional work.

So in summary, we're very happy with the code profiler, it's very
precise and accurate (works fine with PLI stuff or Vera for
instance). Invaluable if you have concerns about your simulation run
time.

Newsletter · Original Contribution Joined: Dec 08, 2003 Posts: 1107

(Originally from Issue 1.4, Item 4.1)

From: Yossi Levhari

I have looked at it from the point of view of an FLI (Foreign Language
Interface ) point of view, and found it very usefull, in terms of the
output that it generates, in trems of PLIless applications I am not
clear on what the gain of using the profiler.

The activation is easy (on/off switch in a .do file).

The output is exteremly usefull.

One annoying fact is that you need (or at least used to need), a
separate license for it, which made it cumbersome (if say the number
of lics you had for this feature is not equivalent to the number of
modelsims that you have).