Chip designers are under constant pressure to enhance
performance of chips while simultaneously minimizing cost. One way to achieve
this is by speeding up the verification process - as verification constitutes
more than 70% of the entire chip design process, embracing tools and
technologies that result in faster verification is the need of the hour.
The Need for Hardware Assisted Verification Models
In order to meet the demands of shortened development
cycles, it is essential for hardware and software on a chip to be verified at
the same time. Since software development cannot wait till the hardware aspects
of the chip are developed, design teams need to adopt a fail-safe way to verify
chips will work as intended as soon as the embedded software is run. This
requires the design team to create a working prototype for software development
as early as possible, and much before the end of the hardware design cycle.
Hardware Assisted Technology
Given time-to-market pressures, the process of verification
has come a long way. For many digital design engineers, there are some
compelling reasons for performing hardware-assisted verification. Since
performance is key, it is important for verification systems to deliver the
highest performance models and environment for SoC verification.
• Hardware acceleration techniques help overcome the
challenge of meeting the performance requirements for SoC verification.
• Writing SystemVerilog testbenches for a specific piece of
design can be very laborious, especially while testing the interaction between
different blocks.
• With hardware-assisted verification, you do not have to
write the testbench or worry about how the interfaces will be exercised.
• For example, to check if a peripheral device works as
intended, you can take a physical or virtual peripheral device, connect it up
to the design and then use the device driver for the controller to perform
functions to see if the interface works.
• As the number of vectors that can be run per second is
substantial, you can make sure that the interaction between hardware and
software is as expected in shorten span of time
• hardware prototype development services allow you to use components like
FPGAs to build the hardware platform.
• Using embedded test benches, you can perform
hardware-assisted verification and virtualize the environment to speed up the
verification process.
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| Hardware Prototype Development |
Emulation Systems
With increases in the size and complexity of today's SoC
devices, verification requires you to conduct massive tests spanning billions
of cycles. Using advanced verification technologies like hardware-assisted
emulation systems, you can accelerate the verification process and deliver the
highest performance possible:
• Modern emulation systems encompass a broad portfolio of
transactors and memory models that speed up the development of virtual system
level verification environments.
• Emulation systems offer comprehensive debug with full
signal visibility and support advanced use modes including power management
verification and hybrid emulation
• With emulation, the design-under-test (DUT) is usually
represented in the emulator, while the chip's environment can be provided by
connections outside the emulator.
• By using virtual bridges in conjunction with virtual test
environments, you can connect the DUT through protocol-specific transactors to
real devices
• In addition, system-level debug components can also be
used to understand the high-level behaviour of SoCs.
Prototyping
Another way to improve the verification process is to use
physical prototyping to meet time-to-market requirements.
• By leveraging a hardware assisted system environment,
prototyping enables early embedded software development, allowing hardware and
software to co-exist well ahead of chip fabrication.
• You can shorten design schedules and avoid costly device
re-spins through the use of tightly integrated and easy-to-use hardware and
tools, and accelerate the process of software development
• Hardware-assisted prototyping enables you to eliminate
redundant IP prototyping tasks by using pre-tested components and maximize ROI
by applying modular systems across multiple projects
• You can make your products immediately available using the
latest generation of FPGA devices, bypassing the effort and expense of
custom-built systems
Reduce Verification Effort
Although as a designer, you may choose different methods for
verification, the fact remains that hardware-assisted technology can help you
speed the overall verification effort. Hardware-assisted verification reduces
the amount of effort - in developing the model as well as in writing the test
benches. You not only speed up the verification of the hardware, but also
quicken the process of debugging, and ensure faster time-to-market.
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