Integrated Design Validation: Combining Simulation and Formal Verification for Digital Integrated Circuits

Lun Li, Mitchell Thornton, Stephen Szygenda

The correct design of complex hardware continues to challenge engineers. Bugs in a design that are not uncovered in early design stages can be extremely expensive. Simulation is a predominantly used tool to validate a design in industry. Formal verification overcomes the weakness of exhaustive simulation by applying mathematical methodologies to validate a design. The work described here focuses upon a technique that integrates the best characteristics of both simulation and formal verification methods to provide an effective design validation tool, referred as Integrated Design Validation (IDV). The novelty in this approach consists of three components, circuit complexity analysis, partitioning based on design hierarchy, and coverage analysis. The circuit complexity analyzer and partitioning decompose a large design into sub-components and feed sub-components to different verification and/or simulation tools based upon known existing strengths of modern verification and simulation tools. The coverage analysis unit computes the coverage of design validation and improves the coverage by further partitioning. Various simulation and verification tools comprising IDV are evaluated and an example is used to illustrate the overall validation process. The overall process successfully validates the example to a high coverage rate within a short time. The experimental result shows that our approach is a very promising design validation method.

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