How formal MDV can eliminate IP integration uncertainty

The increased deployment of silicon intellectual property (IP) blocks is vital to boosting productivity in the development of large, complex system-on-chip (SoC) designs. But the increase in SoC design productivity is not matched by as great an increase in SoC verification productivity. Managers and engineers still struggle with a persistent “verification productivity gap.” Why? Because there is a persistent IP verification quality gap, too. The resulting uncertainty about the original verification quality of individual IP blocks often requires time-consuming remedial verification by the SoC design team. The alternative is to risk SoC design failure because of inadequate IP verification, which ultimately delays the project even more.

This article outlines how the latest formal metric-driven verification (MDV) methodology and technologies can eliminate integration uncertainty through the automatic generation of Accellera-defined coverage metrics, without the assistance of simulation. This formal MDV methodology measures not only the usual control coverage, but also observation coverage — a serious missing link in many other MDV approaches. The methodology is easily integrated into existing MDV flows or can be used stand-alone.

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