Dillan Mills, Synopsys, Inc.; Chip Haldane, The Chip Abides, LLC
This paper presents solutions to problems encountered in the implementation of policy classes for SystemVerilog constraint layering. Policy classes provide portable and reusable constraints that can be mixed and matched into the object being randomized. There have been many papers and presentations on policy classes since the original presentation by John Dickol at DVCon 2015. The paper addresses three problems shared by all public policy class implementations and presents a solution to a fourth problem. The proposed solutions introduce policy class inheritance, tightly pair policy definitions with the class they constrain, reduce the expense of defining common policies using macros, and demonstrate how to treat policies as disposable and lightweight objects. The paper concludes that the proposed solution improves the usability and efficiency of policy classes for SystemVerilog constraint layering.
