Verification by Error Modeling: Using Testing Techniques in Hardware Verification

✍ Scribed by Katarzyna Radecka, Zeljko Zilic (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 226
• Series: Frontiers in Electronic Testing 25
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

1. DESIGN FLOW Integrated circuit (IC) complexity is steadily increasing. ICs incorporating hundreds of millions of transistors, mega-bit memories, complicated pipelined structures, etc., are now in high demand. For example, Intel Itanium II processor contains more than 200 million transistors, including a 3 MB third level cache. A billion transistor IC was said to be “imminently doable” by Intel fellow J. Crawford at Microprocessor Forum in October 2002 [40]. Obviously, designing such complex circuits poses real challenges to engineers. Certainly, no relief comes from the competitive marketplace, with increasing demands for a very narrow window of time (time-to-market) in engineering a ready product. Therefore, a systematic and well-structured approach to designing ICs is a must. Although there are no widely adhered standards for a design flow, most companies have their own established practices, which they follow closely for in-house design processes. In general, however, a typical product cycle includes few milestones. An idea for a new product starts usually from an - depth market analysis of customer needs. Once a window of opportunity is found, product requirements are carefully specified. Ideally, these parameters would not change during the design process. In practice, initial phases of preparing a design specification are susceptible to potential errors, as it is very difficult to grasp all the details in a complex design.

✦ Table of Contents

Introduction....Pages 1-17
Boolean Function Representations....Pages 18-50
Don’t Cares and Their Calculation....Pages 51-69
Testing....Pages 71-102
Design Error Models....Pages 103-128
Design Verification by At....Pages 129-146
Identifying Redundant Gate and Wire Replacements....Pages 147-186
Conclusions and Future Work....Pages 187-190

✦ Subjects

Circuits and Systems; Electronic and Computer Engineering; Computer-Aided Engineering (CAD, CAE) and Design; Computing Methodologies