A distinct departure from legacy EDA tools is QuestaSim 2024’s native support for "Continuous Integration" (CI) pipelines. The 2024 version ships with containerized builds (Docker/Kubernetes support), allowing verification suites to spin up headless simulations in the cloud without the overhead of X11 graphical interfaces. This "latency" reduction in deployment allows teams to run regression tests on thousands of seeds overnight, a necessity for modern AI accelerator chips. The tag "QuestaSim 2024" in developer forums is now frequently accompanied by discussions of YAML pipelines and GitHub Actions, signifying that hardware verification has finally embraced the software development lifecycle.
Despite these advances, no technology is without friction. Users have noted that the 2024 debug GUI, while feature-rich, has a higher memory footprint for waveform storage than its predecessors. Furthermore, the license management for the new AI debug features is currently segmented as a premium add-on, putting it out of reach for smaller design houses or academic researchers. There is also a steep learning curve for the new Tcl scripting commands required to control the ML-driven coverage closure. Posts tagged Mentor Graphics QuestaSim 2024 Lat...
The 2024 release places a heavy emphasis on "Performance" for constrained-random verification. The random number generator and constraint solver have been overhauled. In complex UVM sequences, solving constraints for legal transaction combinations often consumes as much time as the simulation itself. QuestaSim 2024’s new solver utilizes a concurrent SAT (Boolean satisfiability problem) solver architecture, distributing constraint solving across available cores. This is a radical departure from the linear solvers of the past. For automotive designs with thousands of temporal assertions, this update translates to a 30-40% reduction in testbench compile time. A distinct departure from legacy EDA tools is
One of the most discussed technical tags regarding the 2024 release is “Latency” —specifically, the reduction of simulation-to-debug turnaround time. In previous generations, engineers suffered from high "tooling latency": the delay between writing a testbench and seeing a waveform result. QuestaSim 2024 introduces a re-architected simulation kernel optimized for multi-threading on heterogeneous compute architectures (CPU + GPU). By leveraging dynamic process scheduling, the 2024 version drastically reduces the overhead of context switching for large SystemVerilog testbenches. Consequently, simulation latency for complex Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) environments has reportedly decreased by up to 2x compared to the 2022 baseline. This reduction allows verification engineers to maintain "flow state," iterating on coverage holes without waiting minutes for recompilation. The tag "QuestaSim 2024" in developer forums is
Перейти