Thought Leadership

DAC Panel: Bridging Pre-Silicon Verification and Post-Silicon Validation

I’d like to encourage you to attend the technical panel titled Bridging Pre-Silicon Verification and Post-Silicon Validation at this year’s  DAC.  The panel will be held on Tuesday, June 15, 2010 between 2:00 PM—4:00 PM.

Chair:

Alan Hu – Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Organizers:

Rajesh Galivanche – Intel Corp., Santa Clara, CA

 

Amir Nahir – IBM Corp., Haifa, Israel

 

Avi Ziv – IBM Corp., Haifa, Israel

 

 

Speakers:

Miron Abramovici – Tiger’s Lair, Inc., Vienna, VA

 

Sean Baartmans – Intel Corp., Hillsboro, OR

 

Valeria Bertacco – Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

 

Albert Camilleri – Qualcomm, Inc., San Diego, CA

 

Harry Foster – Mentor Graphics Corp., Plano, TX

 

Shakti Kapoor – IBM Corp., Austin, TX

Why do I think this is an important topic?  At 65nm, we witnessed the post-silicon validation effort often consuming more than 50% of an SoC’s overall design effort, as measured in cost, and the problem grows as the industry continues to move to even smaller geometries. Unlike pre-silicon verification, which has historically (and conveniently) partitioned the verification effort into separate concerns (such as, electrical, functional, performance, and software), identifying failures in post-silicon requires skills spanning multiple validation disciplines. Furthermore, the process of post-silicon validation is hindered by both poor observability and poor controllability. To address today’s escalating validation effort requires establishing a stronger link between the pre-silicon verification and post-silicon validation processes. Certainly assertions are one technique that can bridge pre- and post-silicon by providing improved observability on critical functionality. However, the improvements obtained by silicon assertions are only as effective as the quality of their pre-silicon form. Realistically, only a small set of critical assertions could be shared between the pre- and post-silicon processes. What is needed is a means to instrument into the silicon observability in a reconfigurable fashion, thus allowing the post-silicon validation engineer to shift focus on specific areas of concern. Concerning test generation, pre-silicon test provides insufficient coverage to stress the post-silicon design. Hence, what is needed is a means to capture post-silicon test associated with a failure in an abstract form that can be demonstrated on a pre-silicon model. Finally, concerning triage and error isolation, both the pre-silicon verification and post-silicon validation processes could benefit from automatic techniques that identify a set of candidate causes behind the detected failure.

For more information about the upcoming panel, visit: http://www2.dac.com/panels.aspx?event=30&topic=11

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Harry Foster

Harry Foster is Chief Scientist Verification for the Design Verification Technology Division of Mentor, A Siemens Business; and is the Co-Founder and Executive Editor for the Verification Academy. In addition, Harry is serving as the 2021 Design Automation Conference General Chair. He holds multiple patents in verification and has co-authored six books on verification. Harry was the 2006 recipient of the Accellera Technical Excellence Award for his contributions to developing industry standards, and was the original creator of the Accellera Open Verification Library (OVL) standard.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com/verificationhorizons/2010/06/03/dac-panel-bridging-pre-silicon-verification-and-post-silicon-validation/