On assertions and regular expressions

Text editor is to regular expression as
Waveform is to ... assertion


What I mean is that bump in productivity you get when you've learnt to
use regular expressions with vi/vim/sed/awk/perl/grep... on the unix
command line should be matched by an equal jump in productivity if you
use assertions in your digital design flow.

At the moment, the main digital simulation vendors such as Cadence ncsim, and Mentor questasim allow you to embed or attach assertions to designs that are compiled for simulation, and will automatically extract coverage for these assertions.

What is not so widespread, and what needs to be improved, is the use of interpreted assertions at the command lines of waveform browsers/debugging environments to help navigate waveforms (go to the second write after a read of memory in the range ...),; and to help aggregate displayed waveforms for better understanding of what is shown (highlight any overlap of a write on bus1 with a write on bus2).


I'm currently doing a mind experiment on turning assertions on VCD files, into regular expressions on a string.


- Paddy.