AMBA based Subsystems: What does it take to verify them?

By _VIP Central

October 24, 2012

Let’s look at a typical AMBA based subsystem in the SOCs that you find today:

From this picture, what is clear to me is a preponderance of multiple AMBA components of different flavors (AXI3/4, ACE, AHB, APB). So, even if we have all of the different VIPs to represent these .different flavors, it is not a slam dunk as far as completing the verification of the full subsystem. Stitching all these components together and bringing up such a verification environment itself is a big challenge. To deal with market pressures of shipping out new devices every 4-6 months, SoC companies are adding new design blocks incrementally to existing platforms. Given these time constraints, new verification environments cannot be developed again from scratch.  If we dig deeper, we see the types of verification needed to bring in changes to the SoC:

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