NASA Office of Logic Design

NASA Office of Logic Design

A scientific study of the problems of digital engineering for space flight systems,
with a view to their practical solution.


2006 MAPLD International Conference

Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
with a session at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Washington, D.C.

September 26-28, 2006

Seminar: Design Verification Tutorial

The 2006 MAPLD International Conference seminars will be held on Monday, September 25, 2006 in Meridian C.

Seminar Leaders:

Abstract

The ever-increasing size and complexity of designs is simply a fact of life. The only way to make sure that today’s (and tomorrow’s) designs will function correctly is to build a verification environment that allows you to adopt advanced verification technologies to augment your engineers’ ability to exercise the myriad scenarios under which your design is expected to operate. The question is how to adopt these technologies, like assertions, functional coverage, automated results checking, constrained-random stimulus generation and formal verification, with a minimum of hassle and in a complementary way so they can all work together.

This full-day tutorial will introduce you to each of these technologies, and show you an effective methodology for building a modular, reusable testbench environment that will enable you to adopt them effectively. We will start by introducing each of these technologies in the context of a high-level discussion of verification methodology. We will then provide an in-depth introduction to the IEEE 1800 SystemVerilog language, which provides explicit support for each of these technologies.

We will then proceed to a discussion of testbench architecture, and show how you can use SystemVerilog to build a transaction-level verification environment that allows you to verify designs at multiple levels of abstraction. The use of transaction-level modeling (TLM) for verification allows the testbench to be constructed in a way more consistent with how you think about the problem, and allows all verification components to communicate through consistent interfaces, which provides reusability. These concepts will be demonstrated by a practical example showing the verification of an FPU design implemented both at the transaction-level and in RTL (in VHDL). We will show how to architect the testbench to allow the same stimulus generators and results checkers to be reused, as well as how to use the original TLM as a golden reference model against which the RTL design will be compared.

Presentation: verification_seminar_mapld06.pdf

Logistics

Seminar Schedule

Seminar Outline (Preliminary)

I.                    Introduction

a.       The Difference between Design and Verification

b.      Verification Technology Overview

                                                               i.      The Verification Process

                                                             ii.      Assertion-Based Verification (ABV)

                                                            iii.      Testbench Automation (TBA)

1.      Constrained-Random Stimulus

2.      Functional Coverage

                                                           iv.      Coverage-Driven Verification (CDV)

c.       What is “Verification Methodology”

                                                               i.      Applying technology in effective ways

                                                             ii.      Answering questions about the design

II.                 SystemVerilog Overview

a.       Standardization Process, Background and History

b.      SystemVerilog Motivation

c.       The 4 Quadrants of SystemVerilog

                                                               i.      Design Constructs

                                                             ii.      Verification Constructs

                                                            iii.      Assertions

                                                           iv.      Direct-Programming Interface (DPI)

III.               SystemVerilog for Verification Basics

a.       Assertions

                                                               i.      What is an assertion?

                                                             ii.      Sequences

                                                            iii.      Properties

                                                           iv.      Simulation and Formal Verification

b.      Testbench Constructs

                                                               i.      Randomization and Constraints

1.      Language construct overview

2.      Adopting Incrementally in Existing Environments

                                                             ii.      Functional Coverage

1.      Data-Oriented Coverage

2.      Control-Oriented Coverage

                                                            iii.      SystemVerilog Interfaces

                                                           iv.      Object-Oriented Programming in SystemVerilog

1.      Classes

2.      Inheritance

3.      Polymorphism

IV.              Building a Reusable Verification Environment

a.       What makes a good methodology?

b.      Partitioning the Testbench

                                                               i.      Control vs. Observe

                                                             ii.      Verifying at Multiple Levels of Abstraction

c.       Transaction-Level Modeling in SystemVerilog

                                                               i.      TLM Interfaces

                                                             ii.      Modeling Transactions

                                                            iii.      Modularity and Reusability via TLM

d.      Canonical Verification Components

                                                               i.      Stimulus Generation

                                                             ii.      Active Abstraction Conversion – Drivers

                                                            iii.      Passive Abstraction Conversion – Monitors

                                                           iv.      Analysis

1.      Coverage Collectors

2.      Scoreboards

V.                 Transaction-Level Verification in Action – Verifying an FPU

a.       Assembling the testbench for a TLM

b.      Reusing TLM testbench with RTL design

c.       Reusing TLM as golden model in testbench

VI.              Using SystemVerilog with VHDL Designs

a.       Passing data between languages

b.      Use-model Overview

                                                               i.      SystemVerilog Assertions with VHDL

                                                             ii.      SystemVerilog Testbench with VHDL design

VII.            Conclusion

a.       ROI analysis

b.      Where to find more information

 


Seminars: 2006 MAPLD International Conference

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