A Simple New Approach to Hardware Software Co-Verification

By Ernst Zwingenberger, El Camino GmbH
Mar 5 2007 (1:30 AM), Embedded.com

Coverage-driven verification (CDV) has generated remarkable interest in recent years. Because of its enormously comprehensive capabilities, more and more verification teams are now relying on the CDV approach.

However, implementing a coverage-driven verification environment in a system-level environment requires developing a sequence library, which has proven to be a time-consuming task.

To configure, or reconfigure the library, requires planning for and testing a huge number of interactions with the various portions of the device under test. The challenge poses a significant bottleneck in the verification process of a complex system or device.

A recent project of one of our customers provides a great example. One of their SoCs for use in an HDTV system presented some serious complexity. The SoC included a CPU subsystem, memory manager, and multiple bus interconnects. To test the subsystem, we were looking at more than 6000 register fields - a potential verification bottleneck to say the least.

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