Expert Answer
Anonymous
Situation:
When I inherited a legacy testbench, I noticed it was highly disorganized and unstructured. This created multiple issues, including difficulty in debugging, lack of controllability for scaling, and poor readability. One major bottleneck was that the entire IP relied on a single configuration class, making it hard to manage or extend.
Task:
Although restructuring the testbench was not part of my immediate job responsibilities, I saw the long-term impact of these inefficiencies. I took ownership of the problem and decided to re-architect the testbench structure to improve modularity, maintainability, and reusability.
Action:
I took a couple of days to analyze the structure and made the following improvements:
- Split the single configuration class into multiple per-block config classes, improving modularity.
- Created a common library file to house parameters, commonly used functions, and shared classes, ensuring consistency across the testbench.
- Added control knobs for better configurability and debugging.
Result:
- The new structure allowed us to control configurations of individual blocks independently, making it easier to scale.
- Debugging became much more efficient as we could quickly pinpoint issues to specific classes.
- Reusability increased significantly, as block-level configurations could now be leveraged for both block-level and full-IP testbenches.
- Overall, these changes enhanced productivity and streamlined testbench development.