Simulation-Based Hardware Verification with a Graph-Based Specification

Simulation-based verification continues to be the primary technique for hardware verification due to its scalability and ease of use; however, it lacks exhaustiveness. Although formal verification techniques can exhaustively prove functional correctness, they are limited in terms of the scale of their design due to the state-explosion problem. Alternatively, semiformal approaches can involve a compromise between scalability, exhaustiveness, and resource costs. Therefore, we propose an event-driven flow graph-based specification, which can describe the cycle-accurate functional behaviors without the exploration of whole state space. To efficiently generate input sequences according to the proposed specification, we introduce a functional automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) approach, which involves the proposed intelligent redundancy-reduction strategy to solve problems of random test vectors. We also proposed functional coverage criterion based on the formal specification to support a more reliable measure of verification. We implement a verification platform based on the proposed semiformal approach and compare the proposed semiformal approach with the constrained randomized test (CRT) approach. The experiment results show that the proposed semiformal verification method ensures a more exhaustive and effective exploration of the functional correctness of designs under verification (DUVs).