Industry Expert Blogs

The ARM® AMBA4® specification for the connection and management of functional blocks in a system-on-chip (SoC) now features Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI)™ coherency extensions (ACE)™ in support of multi-core computing. The ACE specification enables system-level cache coherency across clusters of multi-core processors. When planning the functional verification of such a system, these coherency extensions bring their own complex challenges, such as system-level cache coherency validation and cache state transition validation. At any given time, it’s important to verify that the ACE interconnect can maintain cache coherency across the different ACE masters in the system. With coherency support now in the hardware, together with an associated support protocol, the complexity of the system and the underlying components has increased substantially. The verification of such systems thus faces several challenges. Let’s get a grasp of the requirements on the stimulus generation infrastructure for validating a cache coherent system.

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