Topics

Languages

• SystemVerilog

  SystemVerilog is a hardware description and verification language that combines elements from a number of different language technologies into a unified simulation and synthesis platform. It provides a robust set of features and constructs specifically designed for the verification of complex digital designs including object-oriented programming, assertions, functional coverage and constrained random stimulus generation. As a verification engineer, understanding and utilizing SystemVerilog can greatly enhance your ability to effectively test and verify hardware designs.

• VHDL 2008

  VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language) is a powerful and widely used hardware description language. Introduced as IEEE 1076-2008, VHDL has become a crucial tool for electronic engineers and researchers, facilitating the design and modeling of digital and analog systems. It allows designers to create both RTL (Register-Transfer Level) and structural representations of desired systems by employing constructs such as processes and variables.

  VHDL 2008 is the most widely used and supported version of the language, which was published by the IEEE in 2007. This updated version brings several enhancements and new features to the language, making it more expressive, efficient, and user-friendly.

Methodologies

• Coverage

  Coverage metrics are crucial in digital design verification for ensuring the functionality, reliability, and quality of complex electronic systems. These metrics quantify the extent to which various aspects of the design have been tested, offering a measure of assurance that the design meets its specifications. Coverage metrics help identify untested or under-tested areas, enabling engineers to focus their efforts effectively, improve test plans, and uncover potential bugs or design flaws. They aid in risk mitigation, reducing the likelihood of costly post-production errors. Moreover, they enhance the overall efficiency of the verification process, making it more cost-effective and enabling faster time-to-market. In a world increasingly reliant on electronics, robust coverage metrics are an indispensable part of the verification process required for delivering safe and reliable digital products.

• FPGA Verification

  FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) verification, including methods like simulation and formal verification, is invaluable for ironing out design issues before deploying hardware in the lab. Simulation allows engineers to comprehensively test the FPGA design under various conditions, helping detect and rectify potential bugs and ensuring functionality.

  Formal verification provides mathematical proofs of design correctness, enhancing confidence in the design's safety and reliability. By conducting thorough FPGA verification, costly and time-consuming hardware iterations are minimized, significantly reducing the risk of errors and shortening the time-to-lab phase. This approach ultimately leads to more efficient development, lower expenses, and a faster path to achieving operational hardware.

• UVM - Universal Verification Methodology

  The Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) is a powerful framework for designing and verifying complex digital systems, offering significant benefits in terms of reusable and scalable testbenches. UVM promotes reusability by providing a standardized methodology for creating modular, configurable verification components. This modular approach allows engineers to develop testbenches using reusable building blocks, reducing redundancy and saving time.

  Furthermore, UVM enhances scalability, enabling easy adaptation to changing project requirements. As designs evolve, UVM's hierarchical and flexible architecture simplifies the addition or modification of testbench components, ensuring efficient and maintainable verification environments. Overall, UVM streamlines the verification process, promoting productivity and ensuring robust, adaptable testbenches.

• UVM Framework

  The Universal Verification Methodology Framework (UVMF) is an advanced and comprehensive toolset that extends the capabilities of UVM, the Universal Verification Methodology. UVMF provides a robust and structured approach to verification, offering a wide range of pre-built components, utilities, and testbenches that accelerate and simplify the verification process.

  With UVMF's flexible architecture, verification engineers can effortlessly customize and integrate the components into their specific projects, fostering reusability and scalability. By leveraging UVMF, verification teams can significantly reduce development time, enhance collaboration, and ensure the delivery of high-quality, error-free semiconductor designs to meet the ever-increasing demands of the electronics industry.

• UVMC

  In today's complex and rapidly evolving world of electronic design and verification, verification engineers are constantly seeking innovative solutions to streamline their processes and improve productivity. One such solution that has gained considerable attention and recognition is UVM Connect.

Protocols

• Verification IP

  Avery Verification IP (VIP) plays a crucial role in ensuring the success of complex semiconductor designs by offering a wide range of benefits and a compelling value proposition. Avery Verification IP provides pre-verified and reusable components, tools, and methodologies that enable efficient and thorough verification of electronic designs.

Standards

• Functional Safety

  Functional safety verification in digital design and integrated circuit design is crucial for ensuring that electronic systems operate reliably, especially in safety-critical applications like areospace, automotive, medical devices, and industrial control systems. It focuses on identifying and mitigating potential hazards and failures that could lead to catastrophic consequences.

  By rigorously verifying safety-critical designs, we reduce the risk of system malfunction or failure, safeguarding human lives and valuable assets. This process involves thorough analysis, testing, and adherence to industry standards such as ISO 26262 and DO-254.

  In a world increasingly dependent on digital technology, functional safety verification is paramount to prevent disasters and maintain trust in electronic systems.

• Low Power

  Low Power verification enables early (RTL) verification of active power management applied to a complex design, to ensure that the power management architecture and behavior are correct and that the design will operate correctly under active power management. Power Aware techniques simplify the verification process through a comprehensive suite of static checkers for checking the consistency of the power management architecture and dynamic checks for automated error detection.

  Utilizing Low Power standards provide visualization of power management architecture and behavior, coverage data collection, and test plan generation for power states and state transitions. Based on the UPF for specification of active power management, Power Aware integrates well with other UPF-based tools to support multi-tool and multi-vendor low power design and verification flows.

• Standards

  Electronic Design Automation (EDA) standards, including SystemVerilog, VHDL, UVM, UPF, and others, offer significant benefits in the development of electronic systems. These standards provide a common framework and language for designers and verification engineers, facilitating collaboration, improving design quality, and accelerating the design process. They enable the creation of robust, interoperable, and reusable designs, ultimately resulting in more efficient and reliable electronic systems.

Techniques

• Acceleration

  Verification is a critical phase in the design and development of digital systems, ensuring their correctness and functionality. Simulation has long been the primary technique used for verification, enabling engineers to model and test designs using software-based models.

  However, as designs have grown increasingly complex, traditional simulation methods have proven to be insufficient in meeting the demands of modern verification. Particularly with the emergence of hardware/software co-verification requirements. This has led to the emergence of emulation as a more efficient and effective approach that combines simulation with hardware acceleration techniques.

• Assertions

  A verification engineer plays a critical role in the development of complex electronic systems, ensuring that these systems meet the desired functionality and adhere to the design specifications. One powerful tool in the verification engineer's arsenal is the use of assertions. Assertions are statements or properties embedded within the verification environment that help identify design bugs and verify the correctness of the system.

• Clock-Domain Crossing

  Designers increasingly use advanced multi-clock architectures to meet the high-performance and low-power requirements of their chips. An RTL or gate-level simulation of a design that has more than one clock domain does not accurately model the silicon behavior related to the transfer of data between asynchronous clock domains. As a consequence, simulation does not accurately predict silicon functionality, risking show-stopper bug escapes due to metastability.

  Metastability is a phenomenon that can cause system failures in digital devices when a signal is transferred between circuitry in unrelated or asynchronous clock domains. This topic area focuses on advanced techniques to find clock-domain crossing errors before they escape into silicon.

• Debug

  Debugging is a critical aspect of the digital design and integrated circuit design process. It ensures that the designed system or chip functions as intended, identifying and rectifying errors, glitches, and unforeseen issues. Effective debugging saves time and resources, preventing costly mistakes from reaching the final product.

  It also enhances product reliability, crucial in safety-critical applications, and reduces post-production maintenance. Debugging tools and techniques are essential for engineers to pinpoint and address issues, making the design process more efficient and leading to the creation of high-quality, dependable digital systems and integrated circuits.

• Formal Verification

  Formal verification is a topic area that encompasses a wide array of formal-based technologies and methodologies, including formal property checking, automatic formal apps, and sequential and logic equivalence verification. By employing mathematical models and logical reasoning, formal solutions scrutinize and validate complex systems, such as hardware circuits with the goal of enhancing reliability and eliminating design flaws.

• Machine Learning

  Machine learning (ML) has emerged as a powerful tool in the field of verification engineering, revolutionizing the way we validate and verify complex systems. Verification engineers are responsible for ensuring that hardware and software systems meet their specifications and perform reliably. In this context, machine learning offers a fresh approach to address challenges and enhance the verification process.

• Planning, Measurement and Analysis

  Planning, measurement, and analysis are critical in digital design and verification as they provide a structured approach to ensure the reliability and functionality of complex electronic systems. Planning sets clear objectives and strategies for verification. Metrics offer quantifiable data to assess progress and completeness, helping to identify untested areas. Analysis enables the detection of design flaws and bugs.

  Together, they enhance efficiency, reduce risks, and accelerate time-to-market, ensuring the final product meets specifications. These processes are indispensable for achieving high-quality, reliable, and compliant digital designs in an increasingly competitive and fast-paced technology landscape.

• Questa Design Solutions

  Questa Design Solutions is an automated and integrated suite of verification tools for designers to improve initial RTL quality. Design Solutions analyzes code at the design stage to detect bugs early, to improve efficiency, enhance development predictability and ease pressure on schedules.

• Reset-Domain Crossing

  The high-level complexities of modern System On Chip (SoC) designs have created a complex architecture of multiple asynchronous reset sources. It is imperative to ensure that the design is reset accurately under all modes of operation. Such complex reset interactions asserting at the transmitting flop may violate setup and hold time considerations in receiving flop in different asynchronous reset domain and cause metastable data at the output of receiving flop resulting in reset domain crossings.

  A comprehensive and precise analysis is required to not only identify such crossings causing real and critical issues but also avoid reporting false bugs. This topic area focuses on advanced techniques to find reset-domain crossing errors in efficient way before they escape into silicon.

• Simulation

  Simulation plays a pivotal role in the digital design and verification process. Its primary purpose is to validate whether the design being created functions according to the specified requirements. By running simulations early in the design phase, potential issues can be identified, thus minimizing the need for extensive code revisions. Simulations can be performed at different levels of abstraction and at various stages throughout the design process.

• Verification IQ

  Big data is transforming all industries, enabling them to innovate their products more rapidly and improve many aspects of our lives. EDA is powering these transformations. Verification needs to transform in step, so we can predict which test to run next, the root cause of a failure, and what stimulus is required.

• Verification Management

  Verification is an essential step in the design and development process of complex systems, ensuring that the final product meets the specified requirements and functions as intended. With the increasing complexity of modern systems, the role of verification engineers has become more critical than ever.

  To streamline and optimize the verification process, verification management techniques have emerged as a valuable approach. In this article, we will explore what verification management is and how verification engineers can leverage this technique to enhance their efficiency and effectiveness.