Verification Techniques for System-Level Design


Book Description

This book will explain how to verify SoC (Systems on Chip) logic designs using "formal and "semiformal verification techniques. The critical issue to be addressed is whether the functionality of the design is the one that the designers intended. Simulation has been used for checking the correctness of SoC designs (as in "functional verification), but many subtle design errors cannot be caught by simulation. Recently, formal verification, giving mathematical proof of the correctness of designs, has been gaining popularity.For higher design productivity, it is essential to debug designs as early as possible, which this book facilitates. This book covers all aspects of high-level formal and semiformal verification techniques for system level designs.• First book that covers all aspects of formal and semiformal, high-level (higher than RTL) design verification targeting SoC designs.• Formal verification of high-level designs (RTL or higher).• Verification techniques are discussed with associated system-level design methodology.




High-Level Verification


Book Description

Given the growing size and heterogeneity of Systems on Chip (SOC), the design process from initial specification to chip fabrication has become increasingly complex. This growing complexity provides incentive for designers to use high-level languages such as C, SystemC, and SystemVerilog for system-level design. While a major goal of these high-level languages is to enable verification at a higher level of abstraction, allowing early exploration of system-level designs, the focus so far for validation purposes has been on traditional testing techniques such as random testing and scenario-based testing. This book focuses on high-level verification, presenting a design methodology that relies upon advances in synthesis techniques as well as on incremental refinement of the design process. These refinements can be done manually or through elaboration tools. This book discusses verification of specific properties in designs written using high-level languages, as well as checking that the refined implementations are equivalent to their high-level specifications. The novelty of each of these techniques is that they use a combination of formal techniques to do scalable verification of system designs completely automatically. The verification techniques presented in this book include methods for verifying properties of high-level designs and methods for verifying that the translation from high-level design to a low-level Register Transfer Language (RTL) design preserves semantics. Used together, these techniques guarantee that properties verified in the high-level design are preserved through the translation to low-level RTL.




Reconfigurable System Design and Verification


Book Description

Reconfigurable systems have pervaded nearly all fields of computation and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Reconfigurable System Design and Verification provides a compendium of design and verification techniques for reconfigurable systems, allowing you to quickly search for a technique and determine if it is appropriate to the task at hand. It bridges the gap between the need for reconfigurable computing education and the burgeoning development of numerous different techniques in the design and verification of reconfigurable systems in various application domains. The text explains topics in such a way that they can be immediately grasped and put into practice. It starts with an overview of reconfigurable computing architectures and platforms and demonstrates how to develop reconfigurable systems. This sets up the discussion of the hardware, software, and system techniques that form the core of the text. The authors classify design and verification techniques into primary and secondary categories, allowing the appropriate ones to be easily located and compared. The techniques discussed range from system modeling and system-level design to co-simulation and formal verification. Case studies illustrating real-world applications, detailed explanations of complex algorithms, and self-explaining illustrations add depth to the presentation. Comprehensively covering all techniques related to the hardware-software design and verification of reconfigurable systems, this book provides a single source for information that otherwise would have been dispersed among the literature, making it very difficult to search, compare, and select the technique most suitable. The authors do it all for you, making it easy to find the techniques that fit your system requirements, without having to surf the net or digital libraries to find the candidate techniques and compare them yourself.




System-level Test and Validation of Hardware/Software Systems


Book Description

New manufacturing technologies have made possible the integration of entire systems on a single chip. This new design paradigm, termed system-on-chip (SOC), together with its associated manufacturing problems, represents a real challenge for designers. SOC is also reshaping approaches to test and validation activities. These are beginning to migrate from the traditional register-transfer or gate levels of abstraction to the system level. Until now, test and validation have not been supported by system-level design tools so designers have lacked the infrastructure to exploit all the benefits stemming from the adoption of the system level of abstraction. Research efforts are already addressing this issue. This monograph provides a state-of-the-art overview of the current validation and test techniques by covering all aspects of the subject including: modeling of bugs and defects; stimulus generation for validation and test purposes (including timing errors; design for testability.




Embedded System Design


Book Description

Embedded System Design: Modeling, Synthesis and Verification introduces a model-based approach to system level design. It presents modeling techniques for both computation and communication at different levels of abstraction, such as specification, transaction level and cycle-accurate level. It discusses synthesis methods for system level architectures, embedded software and hardware components. Using these methods, designers can develop applications with high level models, which are automatically translatable to low level implementations. This book, furthermore, describes simulation-based and formal verification methods that are essential for achieving design confidence. The book concludes with an overview of existing tools along with a design case study outlining the practice of embedded system design. Specifically, this book addresses the following topics in detail: . System modeling at different abstraction levels . Model-based system design . Hardware/Software codesign . Software and Hardware component synthesis . System verification This book is for groups within the embedded system community: students in courses on embedded systems, embedded application developers, system designers and managers, CAD tool developers, design automation, and system engineering.




Principles of Functional Verification


Book Description

As design complexity in chips and devices continues to rise, so, too, does the demand for functional verification. Principles of Functional Verification is a hands-on, practical text that will help train professionals in the field of engineering on the methodology and approaches to verification.In practice, the architectural intent of a device is necessarily abstract. The implementation process, however, must define the detailed mechanisms to achieve the architectural goals. Based on a decade of experience, Principles of Functional Verification intends to pinpoint the issues, provide strategies to solve the issues, and present practical applications for narrowing the gap between architectural intent and implementation. The book is divided into three parts, each building upon the chapters within the previous part. Part One addresses why functional verification is necessary, its definition and goals. In Part Two, the heart of the methodology and approaches to solving verification issues are examined. Each chapter in this part ends with exercises to apply what was discussed in the chapter. Part Three looks at practical applications, discussing project planning, resource requirements, and costs. Each chapter throughout all three parts will open with Key Objectives, focal points the reader can expect to review in the chapter.* Takes a "holistic" approach to verification issues* Approach is not restricted to one language* Discussed the verification process, not just how to use the verification language




System Level Design with .Net Technology


Book Description

The first book to harness the power of .NET for system design, System Level Design with .NET Technology constitutes a software-based approach to design modeling verification and simulation. World class developers, who have been at the forefront of system design for decades, explain how to tap into the power of this dynamic programming environment for more effective and efficient management of metadata—and introspection and interoperability between tools. Using readily available technology, the text details how to capture constraints and requirements at high levels and describes how to percolate them during the refinement process. Departing from proprietary environments built around System Verilog and VHDL, this cutting-edge reference includes an open source environment (ESys.NET) that readers can use to experiment with new ideas, algorithms, and design methods; and to expand the capabilities of their current tools. It also covers: Modeling and simulation—including requirements specification, IP reuse, and applications of design patterns to hardware/software systems Simulation and validation—including transaction-based models, accurate simulation at cycle and transaction levels, cosimulation and acceleration technique, as well as timing specification and validation Practical use of the ESys.NET environment Worked examples, end of chapter references, and the ESys.NET implementation test bed make this the ideal resource for system engineers and students looking to maximize their embedded system designs.




ASIC/SoC Functional Design Verification


Book Description

This book describes in detail all required technologies and methodologies needed to create a comprehensive, functional design verification strategy and environment to tackle the toughest job of guaranteeing first-pass working silicon. The author first outlines all of the verification sub-fields at a high level, with just enough depth to allow an engineer to grasp the field before delving into its detail. He then describes in detail industry standard technologies such as UVM (Universal Verification Methodology), SVA (SystemVerilog Assertions), SFC (SystemVerilog Functional Coverage), CDV (Coverage Driven Verification), Low Power Verification (Unified Power Format UPF), AMS (Analog Mixed Signal) verification, Virtual Platform TLM2.0/ESL (Electronic System Level) methodology, Static Formal Verification, Logic Equivalency Check (LEC), Hardware Acceleration, Hardware Emulation, Hardware/Software Co-verification, Power Performance Area (PPA) analysis on a virtual platform, Reuse Methodology from Algorithm/ESL to RTL, and other overall methodologies.




Formal Hardware Verification


Book Description

This state-of-the-art monograph presents a coherent survey of a variety of methods and systems for formal hardware verification. It emphasizes the presentation of approaches that have matured into tools and systems usable for the actual verification of nontrivial circuits. All in all, the book is a representative and well-structured survey on the success and future potential of formal methods in proving the correctness of circuits. The various chapters describe the respective approaches supplying theoretical foundations as well as taking into account the application viewpoint. By applying all methods and systems presented to the same set of IFIP WG10.5 hardware verification examples, a valuable and fair analysis of the strenghts and weaknesses of the various approaches is given.




System-on-a-Chip Verification


Book Description

This is the first book to cover verification strategies and methodologies for SOC verification from system level verification to the design sign-off. All the verification aspects in this exciting new book are illustrated with a single reference design for Bluetooth application.