cocotb as a way towards a new verification methodology (Marek Cieplucha)

SystemVerilog and UVM have dominated digital verification, even though they are relatively old technologies with significant limitations. The EDA industry's strategy has been to develop smarter (and more expensive) tools based on these technologies. However, Cocotb offers a different approach. It minimizes the reliance on EDA tools (limited to just simulation) by enabling the vast capabilities of the Python ecosystem. Is this a recipe for success? What challenges does it present? Is there room for both strategies in the future? In this presentation, I will discuss some general considerations, as well as share experiences from successful deployments of the Cocotb flow in industrial projects (which might even be in your pocket right now). Some fancy around-Cocotb ideas developed will be shown: usage of massive parallelism, flow unification with algorithm-level modeling and checkpointing.