According to Moore’s Law, system-on-chips (SoCs) should continually become more complex and integrate more components, enabled by each reduction in silicon technologies. However, power consumption does not follow the linear path implied here due to increasing leakage in deep sub-micron technologies. Hence, new power management techniques are needed to reduce power dissipation as much as […]
The article describes LSI’s work on the use of a single SystemVerilog-based (SV) verification environment for both the chip and its submodules. The environment is based on SV’s Advanced Verification Methodology (AVM) libraries, although alternatives are available. One particular reason for choosing AVM was that LSI wanted to leverage its transaction-level modeling capabilities as well […]
Erich Marschner Accellera’s Unified Power Format (UPF) is in production use today, delivering the low-power system-on-chip (SoC) designs that are so much in demand. Building upon that success, IEEE Std 1801-2009 [UPF] offers additional features that address the challenges of low-power design and verification. These include more abstract specifications for power supplies, power states, and […]
The article describes a dedicated low-power functional verification methodology, originally developed at STMicroelectronics (now ST-Ericsson). The article details the content, sequence and effectiveness of the methodology as it was tested on a 45nm system-on-chip design. In order of use, the main components are: A high-level verification language testbench Formal verification Rule checking C function library […]
The article describes the context and need for embedded operating systems that are more responsive to the power management demands placed on today’s electronic devices. It reviews the design objectives for the two main types of power management, reactive and proactive, and examines how both can be implemented. For decades, scientists and engineers have been […]
Traditional verification tools struggle to deal with today’s increasingly sophisticated power management technologies. One major limitation is that they cannot deal with varying power states because they make a built-in assumption that devices are always fully powered on. Further, power-aware verification at the register-transfer level is proving increasingly problematic, although it is also becoming increasingly […]
Today’s system-on-chip designs often need to encompass multiple asynchronous clocks. This raises the problem of verification for the resultant clock domain crossings. It is becoming apparent that functional simulation alone is not up to the task. Instead, engineers need to consider hybrid methodologies, combining structural and functional verification approaches. The use of assertions is also […]
The article describes how methodologies such as graph-based intelligent testbench automation will help engineers efficiently create verification scenarios and stimuli. This is a powerful way of enhancing advanced verification environments and reducing common verification headaches (e.g., reaching coverage goals). Such strategies can help to free up resources, in terms of time, people and hardware, so […]
Clock domain crossing (CDC) errors can cause serious design failures. These can be avoided by following a few critical guidelines and using well-established verification techniques. The guidelines include: When passing 1bit between clock domains: register the signal in the sending clock domain to remove combinational settling; and synchronize the signal into the receiving clock domain. […]