[IEEE 2012 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE 2012) - Dresden (2012.03.12-2012.03.16)] 2012 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE) - FAST-GP: An RTL functional verification framework based on fault simulation on GP-GPUs

✍ Scribed by Bombieri, N.; Fummi, F.; Guarnieri, V.

• Book ID: 121287049
• Publisher: IEEE
• Year: 2012
• Weight: 130 KB
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 3981080181
• DOI: 10.1109/DATE.2012.6176532

✦ Synopsis

This paper presents FAST-GP, a framework for functional verification of RTL designs, which is based on fault injection and parallel simulation on GP-GPUs. Given a fault model, the framework translates the RTL code into an injected C code targeting NVIDIA GPUs, thus allowing a very fast parallel automatic test pattern generation and fault simulation. The paper compares different configurations of the framework to better exploit the architectural characteristics of such GP-GPUs (such as thread synchronization, branch divergence, etc.) by considering the architectural characteristics of the RTL design under verification (i.e., complexity, size, number of injected faults, etc.). Experimental results have been conducted by applying the framework to different designs, in order to prove the methodology effectiveness.