VyperCore at ORConf: Forastero: cocotb testbenches with batteries included

Forastero: cocotb testbenches with batteries included

At ORConf 2024 in Gothenburg, Sweden, Peter Birch, VP of Engineering at VyperCore, presented a talk titled ‘Forastero: cocotb testbenches with batteries included’.

The ORConf conference is a weekend of presentations and networking dedicated to free and open source silicon. It's an event for the open source silicon community, and is run by the FOSSi Foundation and its volunteers.

Forastero, an external tool that Peter created, is a Python library that builds on top of cocotb adding standard components like drivers, monitors, and scoreboards but without bringing the full weight of a Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) environment. While in some ways a spiritual successor to cocotb-bus, Forastero goes further and provides mechanisms for generating complex random stimulus. In this talk Peter presents how you can use Forastero to quickly construct a testbench around a Device Under Test (DUT), driving and monitoring multiple interfaces, and producing complex stimulus patterns.

Forastero is fully open source and comes with both documentation and examples. It can be found on GitHub at github.com/Intuity/forastero

Peter’s talk is available here and the slides are available here

The full conference web page and list of other talks is available here