e was first developed in 1992 in Israel by Yoav Hollander to drive his Specman software. Specman automated the generation of stimulus necessary to functionally verify a hardware system.
In 1995 Hollander founded a company, InSpec (later renamed Verisity), to commercialize the software. The product was introduced at the 1996 Design Automation Conference.
The e language uses an aspect-oriented programming (AOP) approach, which is an extension of the object-oriented programming approach to specifically address the needs required in functional verification. AOP is a key feature in that it allows for users to easily bolt on additional functionality to existing code in a non-invasive manner. This permits easy reuse and code maintenance which is a huge benefit in the hardware world, where designs are continually being tweaked to meet market demands throughout the project lifecycle. AOP also addresses cross cutting concerns (features that cut across various sections of the code) easily by allowing users to extend either specific or all instances of a particular struct to add functionality. Users can extend several structs to add functionality related to a particular feature and bundle the extensions into a single file if desired, providing for more organized file partitioning.
An eVC was a reusable verification component. A methodology facilitating the reuse of eVCs was called eRM. The language was standardized by the IEEE in 2006 – IEEE 1647 and was last updated in 2011.
Acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 2005 for $325.4M.
