The Integrated Circuit (IC) industry has gone without a standardized verification approach for decades. This book defines a uniform, standardizable methodology for verifying the logical behavior of an integrated circuit, whether an I/O controller, a microprocessor, or a complete digital system. This book will help Engineers and managers responsible for IC development to bring a single, standards-based methodology to their R & D efforts, cutting costs and improving results.
"As chip size and complexity continues to grow exponentially, the challenges of functional verification are becoming a critical issue in the electronics industry. It is now commonly heard that logical errors missed during functional verification are the most common cause of chip re-spins, and that the costs associated with functional verification are now outweighing the costs of chip design. To cope with these challenges engineers are increasingly relying on new design and verification methodologies and languages. Transaction-based design and verification, constrained random stimulus generation, functional coverage analysis, and assertion-based verification are all techniques that advanced design and verification teams routinely use today. Engineers are also increasingly turning to design and verification models based on C/C++ and SystemC in order to build more abstract, higher performance hardware and software models and to escape the limitations of RTL HDLs. This new book, Advanced Verification Techniques, provides specific guidance for these advanced verification techniques. The book includes realistic examples and shows how SystemC and SCV can be applied to a variety of advanced design and verification tasks." - Stuart Swan
Addressing the need for full and accurate functional information during the design process, this guide offers a comprehensive overview of functional verification from the points of view of leading experts at work in the electronic-design industry.
Silicon technology now allows us to build chips consisting of tens of millions of transistors. This technology not only promises new levels of system integration onto a single chip, but also presents significant challenges to the chip designer. As a result, many ASIC developers and silicon vendors are re-examining their design methodologies, searching for ways to make effective use of the huge numbers of gates now available. These designers see current design tools and methodologies as inadequate for developing million-gate ASICs from scratch. There is considerable pressure to keep design team size and design schedules constant even as design complexities grow. Tools are not providing the productivity gains required to keep pace with the increasing gate counts available from deep submicron technology. Design reuse - the use of pre-designed and pre-verified cores - is the most promising opportunity to bridge the gap between available gate-count and designer productivity. Reuse Methodology Manual for System-On-A-Chip Designs, Second Edition outlines an effective methodology for creating reusable designs for use in a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) design methodology. Silicon and tool technologies move so quickly that no single methodology can provide a permanent solution to this highly dynamic problem. Instead, this manual is an attempt to capture and incrementally improve on current best practices in the industry, and to give a coherent, integrated view of the design process. Reuse Methodology Manual for System-On-A-Chip Designs, Second Edition will be updated on a regular basis as a result of changing technology and improved insight into the problems of design reuse and its role in producing high-quality SoC designs.
This revised and updated third edition outlines a set of best practices for creating reusable designs for use in an System-on-a-Chip (SoC) design methodology. These practices are based on the authors' experience in developing reusable designs, as well as the experience of design teams in many companies around the world.
mental improvements during the same period. What is clearly needed in verification techniques and technology is the equivalent of a synthesis productivity breakthrough. In the second edition of Writing Testbenches, Bergeron raises the verification level of abstraction by introducing coverage-driven constrained-random transaction-level self-checking testbenches all made possible through the introduction of hardware verification languages (HVLs), such as e from Verisity and OpenVera from Synopsys. The state-of-art methodologies described in Writing Test benches will contribute greatly to the much-needed equivalent of a synthesis breakthrough in verification productivity. I not only highly recommend this book, but also I think it should be required reading by anyone involved in design and verification of today's ASIC, SoCs and systems. Harry Foster Chief Architect Verplex Systems, Inc. xviii Writing Testbenches: Functional Verification of HDL Models PREFACE If you survey hardware design groups, you will learn that between 60% and 80% of their effort is now dedicated to verification.
One of the biggest challenges in chip and system design is determining whether the hardware works correctly. That is the job of functional verification engineers and they are the audience for this comprehensive text from three top industry professionals.As designs increase in complexity, so has the value of verification engineers within the hardware design team. In fact, the need for skilled verification engineers has grown dramatically--functional verification now consumes between 40 and 70% of a project's labor, and about half its cost. Currently there are very few books on verification for engineers, and none that cover the subject as comprehensively as this text. A key strength of this book is that it describes the entire verification cycle and details each stage. The organization of the book follows the cycle, demonstrating how functional verification engages all aspects of the overall design effort and how individual cycle stages relate to the larger design process. Throughout the text, the authors leverage their 35 plus years experience in functional verification, providing examples and case studies, and focusing on the skills, methods, and tools needed to complete each verification task. - Comprehensive overview of the complete verification cycle - Combines industry experience with a strong emphasis on functional verification fundamentals - Includes real-world case studies
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.
This book provides a systematic and standardized approach based on the authors’ over 30 years of research experience with weight function methods, as well as the relevant literature. Fracture mechanics has become an indispensable tool for the design and safe operation of damage-tolerant structures in many important technical areas. The stress intensity factor—the characterizing parameter of the crack tip field—is the foundation of fracture mechanics analysis. The weight function method is a powerful technique for determining stress intensity factors and crack opening displacements for complex load conditions, with remarkable computational efficiency and high accuracy. The book presents the theoretical background of the weight function methods, together with a wealth of analytical weight functions and stress intensity factors for two- and three-dimensional crack geometries; many of these have been incorporated into national, international standards and industrial codes of practice. The accuracy of the results is rigorously verified, and various sample applications are provided. Accordingly, the book offers an ideal reference source for graduate students, researchers, and engineers whose work involves fracture and fatigue of materials and structures, who need not only stress intensity factors themselves but also efficient and reliable tools for obtaining them.
I am glad to see this new book on the e language and on verification. I am especially glad to see a description of the e Reuse Methodology (eRM). The main goal of verification is, after all, finding more bugs quicker using given resources, and verification reuse (module-to-system, old-system-to-new-system etc. ) is a key enabling component. This book offers a fresh approach in teaching the e hardware verification language within the context of coverage driven verification methodology. I hope it will help the reader und- stand the many important and interesting topics surrounding hardware verification. Yoav Hollander Founder and CTO, Verisity Inc. Preface This book provides a detailed coverage of the e hardware verification language (HVL), state of the art verification methodologies, and the use of e HVL as a facilitating verification tool in implementing a state of the art verification environment. It includes comprehensive descriptions of the new concepts introduced by the e language, e language syntax, and its as- ciated semantics. This book also describes the architectural views and requirements of verifi- tion environments (randomly generated environments, coverage driven verification environments, etc. ), verification blocks in the architectural views (i. e. generators, initiators, c- lectors, checkers, monitors, coverage definitions, etc. ) and their implementations using the e HVL. Moreover, the e Reuse Methodology (eRM), the motivation for defining such a gui- line, and step-by-step instructions for building an eRM compliant e Verification Component (eVC) are also discussed.
