To boost both productivity and quality of block- and sub–system-level hardware verification, two critical capabilities are required. The first is performance that is orders of magnitude higher compared to software simulation. This performance can be easily achieved with a combination of SystemC
® or Specman
® simulation languages and with hardware-assisted verification. The second requirement is the ability to support a metric-driven methodology. To achieve project goals, a system-level environment must collect metrics such as assertion coverage, software-driver interaction coverage, directed test coverage, constrained-random stimulus generation combined with verification planning and management, and coverage collection and analysis are essential.
Cadence
® Incisive
® coverage-driven verification can be applied at the system level to automate, and to significantly increase the productivity and quality of, hardware/software co-verification. The Incisive solution can be applied to different testbench languages (SystemC, Specman e) with transaction-based acceleration techniques and Cadence accelerated VIP to enable dynamic stimulus generation, which exercises corner cases across the HW/SW boundaries and leverages coverage metrics to ensure that all important system features have been exercised.
Incisive Software Extensions add powerful coverage-driven verification capabilities at the system level, and they support both constrained-random stimulus for embedded software drivers/API in an SoC as well as sophisticated metric-driven collection and analysis methods. Both Incisive
Xtreme® and
Palladium® series of accelerators and emulators fully support Incisive Software Extensions and can further increase system-level verification performance to emulation speeds up to 1MHz+.
The Incisive coverage-driven verification solution can verify the complete system while also supporting the ability to boot an OS and running real application software by leveraging in-circuit emulation techniques with powerful debug capabilities. Cadence technologies for in-circuit emulation include
Palladium and
Xtreme accelerators/emulators as well as
SpeedBridge Adapters.