Verification

Simple course for students and engineers who wants to learn concepts of verification and basic SystemVerilog Constructs

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 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.

The use of mathematical methods in the development of software is essential when reliable systems are sought; in particular they are now strongly recommended by the official norms adopted in the production of critical software.

This book examines several leading-edge design and verification technologies that have been successfully applied to microprocessor systems for high-assurance applications at various levels – from arithmetic circuits to microcode to instruction sets to operating systems to applications. We focus on recent hardware, software, and system designs that have actually been built and deployed, and feature systems that have been certified at high Evaluation Assurance Levels, namely the Rockwell Collins AAMP7G microprocessor (EAL7) and the Green Hills INTEGRITY-178B separation kernel (EAL6+). The contributing authors to this book have endeavored to bring forth truly new material on significant, modern design and verification efforts; many of the results described herein were obtained only within the past year.

This practical book provides a step-by-step, interactive introduction to formal verification of systems and circuits. It presents theoretical background and introduces the application of three powerful verification toolsets: LOTOS-based CADP, Petri nets–based PETRIFY, and CCS-based CWB. The book covers verification of modular asynchronous circuits, alternating-bit protocols, arbiters, pipeline controllers, up-down counters, and phase converters, as well as many other verification examples.

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.