Advanced Verification Topics

The Accellera Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) standard is architected to scale, but verification is growing and in more than just the digital design dimension. It is growing in the SoC dimension to include low-power and mixed-signal and the system integration dimension to include multi-language support and acceleration. These items and others all contribute to the quality of the SOC so the Metric-Driven Verification (MDV) methodology is needed to unify it all into a coherent verification plan. This book is for verification engineers and managers familiar with the UVM and the benefits it brings to digital verification but who also need to tackle specialized tasks. It is also written for the SoC project manager that is tasked with building an efficient worldwide team. While the task continues to become more complex, Advanced Verification Topics describes methodologies outside of the Accellera UVM standard, but that build on it, to provide a way for SoC teams to stay productive and profitable.

"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. To cope with these challenges engineers are increasingly relying on new design and verification methodologies and languages. Transaction-based design and verification, constrained random stimulus generation, functional coverage analysis, and assertion-based verification are all techniques that advanced design and verification teams routinely use today. Engineers are also increasingly turning to design and verification models based on C/C++ and SystemC in order to build more abstract, higher performance hardware and software models and to escape the limitations of RTL HDLs. This new book, Advanced Verification Techniques, provides specific guidance for these advanced verification techniques. The book includes realistic examples and shows how SystemC and SCV can be applied to a variety of advanced design and verification tasks." - Stuart Swan

Professional Verification is a guide to advanced functional verification in the nanometer era. It presents the best practices in functional verification used today and provides insights on how to solve the problems that verification teams face. Professional Verification is based on the experiences of advanced verification teams throughout the industry, along with work done at Cadence Design Systems. Professional Verification presents a complete and detailed Unified Verification Methodology based on the best practices in use today. It also addresses topics important to those doing advanced functional verification, such as assertions, functional coverage, formal verification, and reactive testbenches.

With both cookbook-style examples and in-depth verification background, novice and expert verification engineers will find information to ease their adoption of this emerging Accellera standard.

VERILOG HDL, Second Editionby Samir PalnitkarWith a Foreword by Prabhu GoelWritten forboth experienced and new users, this book gives you broad coverage of VerilogHDL. The book stresses the practical design and verification perspective ofVerilog rather than emphasizing only the language aspects. The informationpresented is fully compliant with the IEEE 1364-2001 Verilog HDL standard. Among its many features, this edition- bull; bull;Describes state-of-the-art verification methodologies bull;Provides full coverage of gate, dataflow (RTL), behavioral and switch modeling bull;Introduces you to the Programming Language Interface (PLI) bull;Describes logic synthesis methodologies bull;Explains timing and delay simulation bull;Discusses user-defined primitives bull;Offers many practical modeling tips Includes over 300 illustrations, examples, and exercises, and a Verilog resource list.Learning objectives and summaries are provided for each chapter. About the CD-ROMThe CD-ROM contains a Verilog simulator with agraphical user interface and the source code for the examples in the book. Whatpeople are saying about Verilog HDL- "Mr.Palnitkar illustrates how and why Verilog HDL is used to develop today'smost complex digital designs. This book is valuable to both the novice and theexperienced Verilog user. I highly recommend it to anyone exploring Verilogbased design." -RajeevMadhavan, Chairman and CEO, Magma Design Automation "Thisbook is unique in its breadth of information on Verilog and Verilog-relatedtopics. It is fully compliant with the IEEE 1364-2001 standard, contains allthe information that you need on the basics, and devotes several chapters toadvanced topics such as verification, PLI, synthesis and modelingtechniques." -MichaelMcNamara, Chair, IEEE 1364-2001 Verilog Standards Organization Thishas been my favorite Verilog book since I picked it up in college. It is theonly book that covers practical Verilog. A must have for beginners andexperts." -BerendOzceri, Design Engineer, Cisco Systems, Inc. "Simple,logical and well-organized material with plenty of illustrations, makes this anideal textbook." -Arun K. Somani, Jerry R. Junkins Chair Professor,Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames PRENTICE HALL Professional Technical Reference Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458 www.phptr.com ISBN: 0-13-044911-3

This book, the Mixed-signal Methodology Guide: Advanced Methodology for AMS IP and SoC Design, Verification, and Implementation provides a broad overview of the design, verification and implementation methodologies required for today's mixed-signal designs. The book covers mixed-signal design trends and challenges, abstraction of analog using behavioral models, assertion-based metric-driven verification methodology applied on analog and mixed-signal and verification of low power intent in mixed-signal design. It also describes methodology for physical implementation in context of concurrent mixed-signal design and for handling advanced node physical effects. The book contains many practical examples of models and techniques. The authors believe it should serve as a reference to many analog, digital and mixed-signal designers, verification, physical implementation engineers and managers in their pursuit of information for a better methodology required to address the challenges of modern mixed-signal design.

A key strength of this book is that it describes the entire verification cycle and details each stage. The organization of the book follows the cycle, demonstrating how functional verification engages all aspects of the overall design effort and how individual cycle stages relate to the larger design process. Throughout the text, the authors leverage their 35 plus years experience in functional verification, providing examples and case studies, and focusing on the skills, methods, and tools needed to complete each verification task. Additionally, the major vendors (Mentor Graphics, Cadence Design Systems, Verisity, and Synopsys) have implemented key examples from the text and made these available on line, so that the reader can test out the methods described in the text.

What if you could use software to design hardware? Not just any hardware--imagine specifying the behavior of a complex parallel computer, sending it to a chip, and having it run on that chip--all without any manufacturing? With Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), you can design such a machine with your mouse and keyboard. When you deploy it to the FPGA, it immediately takes on the behavior that you defined. Want to create something that behaves like a display driver integrated circuit? How about a CPU with an instruction set you dreamed up? Or your very own Bitcoin miner You can do all this with FPGAs. Because you're not writing programs--rather, you're designing a chip whose sole purpose is to do what you tell it--it's faster than anything you can do in code. With Make: FPGAs, you'll learn how to break down problems into something that can be solved on an FPGA, design the logic that will run on your FPGA, and hook up electronic components to create finished projects.