VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

WHY PLAN ?

Design has outpaced verification. We need better methodology to cope with larger designs.

Closing coverage is taking up more and more of verification time.

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Majority of respins are due to design errors or incorrect specifications.

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Ideally we want separate design and verification teams to use objective eyes and thinking.

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Verification is 70% of the effort so start early.

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Reduce debug from 5 or 6 days to 1 or 2 days Focus on reducing the 54% Debug time

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Quantify !! How many assertions are we going to have? How many monitors? How many VIP (Verification IP)?

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Setup Verification Infrastructure before RTL is ready. Change Management Verification Plan Usually it takes 2,3 or even 4 cycles of verification/tapeout before complete maturity occurs for the verification team. Verification team is now about the same size as design team.

Need people with software/object oriented background to get the flow working and regressing and reporting.

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

WHY IT’S HARD

CK – checkers for protocol timing checks and/or internal functional coverages Broadcasting – configuration setup to ensure checkers know which cfg is set. VI – Verification Infrastructure for everything

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Hard – because there are lots to do Triage a regression = analyze and assess effectiveness of tests (large/small functionally coverage)

People – don’t like change and don’t want to change with “new” processes. Hard Because of People Issues and Change Issues

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Need specialists in like OVM TB design, tools,…

VAD – Verification Architecture Document

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Develop levels of verification engineers to ensure specialists and constant improvements.

Good multiple-metric analysis of verification skills

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

PLAN OF ATTACK

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Architect and Flow - Plan Spreadsheet – Populate Day-to-day metrics – Pilot

Orderly and connected Phases What How and in What order…

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Outline good programming practices, public data fields, … VID – which OVM version 2.0 or UVM, start building schedule, which VIP to use?

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Interpret Design Requirement to become a Verification Requirement

Spreadsheet of all these requirements

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

What is the checkin / checkout each day? What is the bug rate each day? Dashboard to analyze metrics. What functional area is still missing? Create set of rules to prevent simulation breakage.

Autogenerated documents and create dashboard to show reports.

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

The order can start from either of the 3 main efforts.

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

The process is continuous and efforts can flow back and forth between Plan <-> Populate <-> Pilot

Requirements = Coverage

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Triage analysis is to assess the overall run (which ones PASS and which ones FAIL) to determine which ones are useful (high functional coverage) and which ones were not useful (low coverage). Of the ones that FAIL, triage can analyze and aid in debug : which are verification code bugs and which ones are RTL design bugs.

DDV = Document Driven Verification RDV = Requirement Driven Verification MDV = Metric Driven Verification CDV = Coverage Driven Verification

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

VP level to get verification methodology kick started

Take individual OVM sequencers and connect up to testbench. Take checkers and create schemes to attack.

VERIFICATION PLANNING by Peet James of Mentor Graphics for Verification Academy

Plan – Determine architecture of testbench and plan of attack. Populate - List of sequences Pilot – Playground for verification engineers to run. Manager to measure metrics VRM – Verification Reuse Methodology Triage – Assessment of regression results to determine high or low quality of tests MDV – Metric Driven Verification