Verification Environment for I/O Virtualization

• Main Authors: Yang-Song Wang, 王陽松
• Other Authors: 郭斯彥
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/61641665183046971502

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 電子工程學研究所 === 96 === With the rapidly progressing Integrated Circuit (IC) technology, the functional verification becomes the bottleneck of development for Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC). Since a complete verification methodology, such as formal verification, is very difficult to apply in real-life cases, simulation-based verification is one of the most frequently used methodologies for the functional verification. Most designers agree that as much as 70 percent of the design cycle is consumed by the functional verification. Therefore, an effective verification method is critical for maintaining the time to market and reducing design cost. This thesis illustrates a Verification Intellectual Property (VIP) method. The characteristics of this VIP are re-useable to build engineers'' confidence in their designs. This VIP is composed of a transaction-based method to build Bus Function Models (BFM), a simulation-based method to simulate the function of the design with the testbenches and an assertion-based method to calculate the function coverage. For massive data transaction simulations, the VIP described uses Programming Language Interface (PLI) to better manage memory usage and effectively reduce simulation time. Using Verilog and PLI to implement BFM is convenient for engineers to maintain it without studying other language and economical to need no other simulator. With the gradually increasing complexity and powerful performance of the Integrated Circuit (IC), more and more engineers pay attention to increase hardware resource utilization, and virtualization technologies is one of these approaches. Recently, Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG.) announced the release of I/O Virtualization (IOV) based on the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI Express). This paper shows a VIP method to set up the verification environment for an I/O Virtualization (IOV) enabled system. Since verification engineers and hardware designers can work at the same time and the integration into the described verification environment is simple, design teams can reduce the time to market and their development costs. The VIP supports designers for a user-friendly verification environment.