The increasing complexity of digital systems makes designers begin to design using abstract system level modeling （SLM）. However, SLM brings new challenges for verification engineers to guarantee the functional equi...The increasing complexity of digital systems makes designers begin to design using abstract system level modeling （SLM）. However, SLM brings new challenges for verification engineers to guarantee the functional equivalence between SLM specifications and lower-level implementa- tions such as those of transaction level modeling （TLM）. This paper proposes a novel method for equivalence checking be- tween SLM and TLM based on coverage directed simulation. Our method randomly simulates an SLM model and uses an satisfiability modulo theories （SMT） solver to generate stimuli for the uncovered area with the direction of a com- posite coverage metric （code coverage and functional cover- age）. Then we run all the generated stimuli （random stimuli and direct stimuli） on both SLM and TLM designs. At the same time, the selected observation variables are compared to evaluate the equivalence between SLM and TLM. Promising experimental results show that our equivalence checking method is more efficient with lower simulation cost.展开更多
文摘The increasing complexity of digital systems makes designers begin to design using abstract system level modeling （SLM）. However, SLM brings new challenges for verification engineers to guarantee the functional equivalence between SLM specifications and lower-level implementa- tions such as those of transaction level modeling （TLM）. This paper proposes a novel method for equivalence checking be- tween SLM and TLM based on coverage directed simulation. Our method randomly simulates an SLM model and uses an satisfiability modulo theories （SMT） solver to generate stimuli for the uncovered area with the direction of a com- posite coverage metric （code coverage and functional cover- age）. Then we run all the generated stimuli （random stimuli and direct stimuli） on both SLM and TLM designs. At the same time, the selected observation variables are compared to evaluate the equivalence between SLM and TLM. Promising experimental results show that our equivalence checking method is more efficient with lower simulation cost.
