Training Experience – Mentor Graphics Higher Education Program

Hello Everyone! This is my training experience, I had at Mentor Graphics, Noida (Higher Education Program) which is conducted annually for pre-final year B.Tech and M.Tech students. It is a two month training program that starts in June and lasts till the last week of July. The main aim of the training is “Verification of Electronic Design and Systems using System Verilog”. A total of 30 students (each Noida and Bangalore) are selected for this program and I was lucky to be one of them.

The training started with the basics of Verilog. Simultaneously we had labs scheduled related to what was taught to us. We used the Mentor tool “Questa” for simulating our designs/test-benches. We were then given a few projects to do on Verilog.

After Verilog, we were taught about System Verilog. Again we started with the basics, like data types, classes, objects etc. and later on we learnt about randomization, coverage and assertions. We were evaluated regularly on our labs and tests were conducted for theory evaluation.

We did a few projects on verification using System Verilog to learn about verification and how System Verilog is used to verify a design. Finally we did the main project which was “Verification of a pipelined and unpipelined LC3 microcontroller”, in which we had to debug the whole microcontroller which consisted of various blocks like fetch, decode, execute, write-back and controller.

This training was a great learning experience for me. I got a flavor of working in the corporate world and to start with an organization like Mentor Graphics was more than expected. I would suggest all students passionate about electronics, especially VLSI to go for this training. It would be a great boost for their career and their passion about VLSI.

Dewansh Aditya Gupta

PS: Mentor Graphics was purchased by Siemens in 2017, and renamed Siemens EDA in 2021.