Verification Challenges:
- Challenges
- Finding all bugs and fast in the design life cycle.
- increasing complexity in design.
- Limited time.
- Limited Resources - Both the person and the compute.
- Always more possible scenarios to test than available time and resource.
- Continuous use of tools and verification process to improve.
Need for Standard Methodology:
- Traditional methods don't scale up or enable re-use across verification for complex design.
- Verification is increasingly becoming critical and complex:
- Building constrained random test benches is complex and time-consuming.
- Projects demand verification engineers to divide and conquer.
- There is a need to speed up the overall process and increase efficiency from project to project.
What is a Verification Methodology?
- Define a set of standards or process that enables efficient Verification.
- Addresses the following aspects:
- Automation
- Abstraction
- Re-use
- Interoperability
- Quality
What must a methodology provide?
- Standard to enable re-use
- Abstraction.
- Project/Company/Industry-wide re-use.
- A layered approach to enable a division of skills and development.
- Developing verification IP.
- Re-using and configuring existing verification IP.
- Separation of stimulus from testbench structure.
- Writing new code:
- Assertions and coverage points.
- Writing or re-using checkers.
- Writing or re-using test cases.
- A consistent approach.
- Naming conventions,
- Verification IP configuration.
- Defining the number of agents.
- How thay connect to the DUT.
- Whether an agent is ACTIVE or PASSIVE.
- Well-defined generation and simulation phases.
- Build, connect, pre-run, run, post-run.
- The power to find bugs fast.
- Faster development of Testbench.
- Good control on stimulus, observability and debug ability.
- Vendor/tool independence
- Verification management - Planning, progress, and completion.
History of Verification Methodologies:
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| FIG: Historical overview of Verification Methodologies. |
- ~1995: Several verification languages existed (SV, e, eRM, RVM, Vera).
- UVM: Open Source, Popular.
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