PDF File - Hardware Verification Group - Concordia University

The successful SoC verification methodology must be able to integrate multiple in-house
or third-party IP cores, effectively migrate testing from the block to the system-level to
maximally leverage testing, integrate software such as drivers and diagnostics, debug, and
provide for the adoption of HDL acceleration and formal verification.
It is important to understand that SoC verification does not imply a homogeneous environment.
There are lots of tools and methods out there. IP comes from many sources, internal
and external. A solid verification methodology must be able to incorporate verification
code from a number of sources, tools, languages, and methods. A successful methodology
is a collection of tools integrated in an open and documented platform. The most effective
way to improve the quality of results, shorten the development time, and decrease costs is
with a careful, consistent verification methodology used throughout the project!
The ideal scenario is to achieve comprehensive validation without redundant effort. Coverage
metrics helps approximate this ideal by acting as heuristic measures that quantify
verification completeness, and identifying inadequately exercised design aspects and
guiding input stimulus generation. A fact is, simulation is no more single player in the verification
of hardware designs. The hybrid approach, mainly based on property checkers
and smart test generation, is being set a default for SoC verification.
References
[1] P. Alexander and D. Barton, “A Tutorial Introduction to Rosetta,” Hardware Description
Languages Conference (HDLCon'01), San Jose, CA., March 2001.
[2] P. Alexander, R. Kamath and D. Barton, “System Specification in Rosetta”, presented at the IEEE
Engineering of Computer Based Systems Symposium, Nashville, Edinburgh, UK, April 2000.
[3] R. Armoni, L. Fix, A. Flaisher, R. Gerth, B. Ginsburg, T. Kanza, A. Landver, S. Mador-Haim, E.
Singerman, A. Tiemeyer, M.Y. Vardi, and Y. Zbar, “The ForSpec temporal logic: A new temporal
property-specification language”, Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of
Systems (TACAS’02), LNCS, Springer-Verlag, 2002.
[4] I. Beer, S. Ben-David, C. Eisner, D. Fisman, A. Gringauze, and Y. Rodeh. “The temporal logic
sugar” . Computer-Aided Verification (CAV’00), volume 2102 of Lecture Notes in Computer
Science, pages 363-367, Springer-Verlag, 2001.
[5] P. Bellows and B. Hutchings, “JHDL - An HDL for Reconfigurable Systems”, IEEE Symposium
on FPGAs for Custom Computing Machines, IEEE Computer Society Pres",Los Alamitos, CA, pp.
175-184, 1998.
[6] J. Bergeron and D. Simmons, “Exploiting the Power of Vera: Creating Useful Class Libraries”
Technical Report, Qualis Design Corporation, 2000.
[7] P. Bergmann and M.A. Horowitz. “Improving coverage analysis and test generation for large
designs”. IEEE Int. Conf. for CAD, pp. 580-584, 1999.
[8] G. Booch, J. Rumbaugh, and I. Jacobson, “The Unified Modeling Language User Guide”, Addison-
Wesley, 1999.
[9] Co-design Automation, “SuperLog Tutorial: A Practical Approach to System Verification and
Hardware Design”. HDL Conference, Santa Clara, CA, USA, February 2001.
30