Wednesday, March 17, 2010

A modern approach to SoC level verification

 

           Verifying SoC is fun and tedious. Especially with several buzz words around the corner, it is quite easy to get lost in maze of buzz-words and miss the goal. At the end one may feel that the plain old wisdom of whiteboard based testcase review/plan is/was lot more controllable & observable. We did that back in 2000 @ Realchip communications and yes it worked really well. But with shrinking times and mounting complexity is that really fast enough? Before I hear constrained-random, blink for a while – how much random do you want your end-to-end data flow in-and-out of ASIC/SoC to be?

We at CVC (www.cvcblr.com) take pride in partnering with all major EDA vendors (http://www.cvcblr.com/partners) – big & small to look for best possible solution for different problems than suggesting “one-size-fit-all” like solution.

Here is a relevant thread @Vguild: http://www.verificationguild.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=17615#17615

I am due to start work on an ASIC, and am wondering about a suitable verification strategy. The ASIC consists of a data path, with continuous data input from ADCs and continuous output to DACs, and a couple of embedded processors utilising external flash and SRAM.

So the interfaces to the ASIC are pretty much:
(1) parallel data bus in
(2) parallel data bus out
(3) external memory interface for CPUs

And here is our own experience/view of some emerging approach to this problem – we don’t claim to have solved it completely, but seem to be making good progress towards a methodical and controllable (yet scalable) manner.

 

Hi Siskin,
Good question/topic. While the value of OVM/VMM is very profound at block levels, their usage at SoC level wherein end-to-end data flow is being checked is not very well reported (yet) in literature. Needless to say they are far better than inventing your own. Especially if you have block-to-system reuse of these VIP components they definitely come very handy. The virtual sequences/multi-stream scenarios do assist but IMHO they come with heavy workouts. Instead what we promote to our customers here and have been proto-typing with at CVC is the solution from Breker, it is called Trek. It can work on top of any existing TB - Verilog/VHDL/TCL/VMM/OVM you name it.
Idea is to reuse the block level components to do what they do best and build tests at a higher level - in this case using graphs, nodes etc. I tend to like this as I used to like Petri nets during my post-graduation days (though didn't followup on my interest afterwards).
My first impression was to use Trek simply as a testcase creation engine but slowly I'm getting convinced it is useful as "checker" as well - especially the end-to-end checks.
You are absolutely right - use assertions in IP interface levels and use some sort of higher level stimulus. Where I see Trek useful in SoC verification is the ability to describe your "flow of data through SoC" as a graph and let the tool generate tests for you. I even jokingly say one can use a palmtop/PDA to draw these graphs during travel, convert them to Trek graph (somehow, didn't chase that dream yet) and have tests ready while I'm on travel - flight/train/bus whatever be it! On a serious note, this is quite similar to how we used to discuss our testplans on a whiteboard during our Realchip (a communication startup in 2000-2001) days, now becoming "executable" Smile
See ST's usage of Trek @
http://www10.edacafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?articleid=787856
Feel free to contact me offline if you need further assistance on Trek. We have our 2nd successful project finishing on using Trek, though these are small/medium scale ones.
My 2 cents!
Srini
www.cvcblr.com
_________________
Srinivasan Venkataramanan
Chief Technology Officer, CVC www.cvcblr.com
A Pragmatic Approach to VMM Adoption
SystemVerilog Assertions Handbook
Using PSL/SUGAR 2nd Edition.
Contributor: The functional verification of electronic systems

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