Using Hardware-Assisted Technology to Speed Up the soc Verification Process
Chip designers are under constant pressure to enhance the performance of chips while simultaneously minimizing cost. One way to attain this is by speeding up the verification method - as verification constitutes more than 70% of the complete chip design process, embracing technologies and tools that result in earlier verification is the need of the hour.
The Need for Hardware-Assisted Verification Models
In order to meet the demands of abridged development cycles, it is essential for software and hardware on a chip to be verified at the same time. Since software development cannot wait till the hardware features of the chip are developed, design teams require to adopt a fail-safe way to verify chips will work as future as soon as the embedded software runs. This requires the design team to generate a working prototype for software development as early as possible, and much before the end of the hardware design cycle.
Hardware Assisted Technology
The process of soc verification has come a long way. For many digital design engineers, there are some convincing reasons for performing hardware-assisted verification. Since performance is the key, it is important for soc verification systems to deliver the highest performance models and atmosphere for soc verification.
Hardware acceleration methods help overcomes the challenge of meeting the performance necessities for soc verification.
• With hardware-assisted soc verification, you do not have to write the test bench or agonize about how the interfaces will be exercised.
• For example, to check if a peripheral device works as intended, you can take a physical or virtual secondary device, connect it up to the design and then use the device driver for the controller to perform functions to see if the interface works properly.
• Hardware accelerators allow you to use components like FPGA to build the hardware platform.
• Using embedded test benches, you can perform Hardware-assisted verification and virtualizes the environment to speed up the soc and FPGA verification process.
With increases in size and complexity of today's soc devices, verification requires you to accomplish massive tests spanning billions of cycles. Using advanced verification technologies like hardware-assisted emulation systems, you can accelerate the verification process and deliver the highest performance.