Accellera Systems Initiative is an independent, not-for profit organization dedicated to create, support, promote, and advance system-level design, modeling, and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry. We are composed of a broad range of members that fully support the work of our technical committee to develop technology standards that are balanced, open, and benefit the worldwide electronics industry. Leading companies and semiconductor manufacturers around the world are using our electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards in a wide range of projects in numerous application areas to develop consumer, mobile, wireless, automotive, and other “smart” electronic devices. Through an ongoing partnership with the IEEE, standards and technical implementations developed by Accellera Systems Initiative are contributed to the IEEE for formal standardization and ongoing governance.
Shuhang Zhang, Infineon Technologies AG; Bryan Olmos, Infineon Technologies AG; Basavaraj Naik, Infineon Technologies AG
Registers in IP blocks of an SoC perform a variety of functions, most of which are essential to the SoC operation. The complexity of register implementation is relatively low when compared with other design blocks. However, the extensive number of registers, combined with the various potential functions they can perform, necessitates considerable effort during implementation, especially when using a manual approach. Therefore, an in-house register generator was proposed by the design team to reduce the manual effort in the register implementation. This in-house register generator supports not only the generation of register blocks but also bus-related blocks. Meanwhile, to support various requirements, 41 switches are used for this generator, which is highly-configurable. From the verification perspective, it is infeasible to achieve complete verification results with a manual approach for all switch combinations. Besides the complexity caused by configurability, the register verification is still time-consuming due to two widely recognized issues: the unreliability of specifications and the complexity arising from diverse access policies. To deal with the highly-configurable feature and both register verification issues, we propose an automated register verification framework using formal methods following the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Based on our results, the human effort in the register verification can be reduced significantly, from 20Man-Day (20MD) to 3MD for each configuration, and 100% code coverage can be achieved. During the project execution, eleven new design bugs are found with the proposed verification framework.