Verification Academy

The design effort for complex ASICs has been able to scale linearly by increasing design reuse and adopting a well-architected, platform-based design structure. Unfortunately, functional verification has not benefited directly from this approach. One way to address increased design complexity is to supplement traditional functional verification methods with assertion-based verification (ABV). Today, ABV has been successfully applied at multiple levels of design and verification abstraction—ranging from high-level assertions within transaction-level testbenches down to implementation-level assertions synthesized into emulation and hardware.

With the advent of standardized assertion languages and assertion libraries, the industry has recently witnessed an increased interest in adopting assertion-based techniques. As we help project teams deploy ABV, we have observed a number of myths, misunderstandings, and costly mistakes. This Verification Academy module directly addresses these issues by introducing a set of steps for advancing an organization’s ABV skills, infrastructure, and metrics for measuring success while identifying process areas requiring improvement. Simulation-based ABV methods are used throughout the methodology we introduce. In addition, formal-based ABV techniques are also highlighted for selected verification hotspots. We provide guidelines for balancing the use of formal and simulation with project constraints, such as: available resources, the skill level of the team, design and verification complexity, and schedule limitations.

This Verification Academy module is intended to be highly interactive—allowing the attendee to ask detailed questions concerning developing a successful ABV methodology.

The target audiences include:

• Crawl - content is technical, but at an introductory level, and of interest to novice engineers.
• Walk - content is of general interest, particularly to managers, but also engineers.
• Run - content is technical in nature, and of interest to engineers.

Required Prerequisite: Evolving Capabilities - Introduction to the Verification Academy.

The Assertion-Based Verification Module contains 11 sessions total including 2 demos: