Design Reuse without Verification Reuse Is Useless

Adnan Hamid, Breker Verification Systems
EETimes (11/26/2012 10:32 AM EST)

Abstract

For years, design productivity has been assisted by increasing levels of reuse. Many system-on-chip (SoC) designs now contain 10s or even 100s of reused intellectual property (IP) blocks that can constitute in excess of 90% of the gates in a chip. In addition, the size of IP blocks has risen from small peripherals to entire subsystems.

What has happened to total productivity over this same period? Productivity is being constrained by verification, but verification has not seen its reuse needs met by models and tools available on the market. As a result, verification continues to take a greater percentage of total time and budget, constraining product innovation that would otherwise be possible.

While some verification IP (VIP) is available, there is not enough and it does not provide the levels of reuse necessary. As SoC design moves to platform IP, where is the corresponding platform VIP? Where are the fully defined verification environments for platform IP that can be extended to add additional functions without having to understand the parts of the platform that are not being modified? Why is verification reuse so far behind design reuse?

These issues are explored in this article along with a way in which full IP-to-SoC verification reuse can be enabled through the use of scenario models.

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