Functional validation of programmable architectures

Abstract

Validation of programmable architectures, consisting of processor cores, coprocessors, and memory subsystems, is one of the major bottlenecks in current system-on-chip design methodology. A critical challenge in validation of such systems is the lack of a golden reference model. Traditional validation techniques employ different reference models depending on the abstraction level and verification task (e.g., functional simulation or property checking), resulting in potential inconsistencies between multiple reference models. This paper presents a validation methodology that uses an architecture description language (ADL) based specification as a golden reference model for validation of programmable architectures, and generation of executable models such as simulators and hardware prototypes. We present a validation framework that uses the generated hardware as a reference model to verify the hand-written implementation using a combination of symbolic simulation and equivalence checking. We also present functional coverage based test generation techniques for validation of pipelined processor architectures. Finally, the generated simulator and hardware models are also used for early exploration of programmable architectures.