New methods of FPGA co-verification for system on chip (SoC)

Abstract

With the rapid development on the software-hardware co-verification of SoC, FPGA verification has become more and more critical for VLSI design, and it requires much more portion of time within the life circle of chip development. The time spent on the FPGA verification should be reduced to achieve a more efficient time-to-market for the IC product. Therefore, several strategies using both dynamic and static methods to execute this verification are proposed in this paper. By using a variety of techniques such as software static breakpoint monitoring and interrupt vectors remapping, the software verification is accelerated. A bus analyzer is adopted to provide real-time bus monitoring with a vivid evaluation of the system performance. In this paper, experiments show that above methods have greatly enhanced the efficiency and speed of the FPGA co-verification process