Constructing reusable testbenches

Abstract

This paper explores a novel approach to classifying, enabling and measuring testbench reuse. Six levels of testbench reusability are presented ranging from utility (lowest), to communication, transactor, generate/check, configuration and tests (highest). The layers provide a template for implementation and enable reuse on a layer-by-layer basis. A qualitative measure of reuse is available directly from the layered model while a quantitative measure is available by examining the effort required to build the layers.