Hybrid approaches for functional verification of microelectronics systems

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Today's digital circuits may contain up to several hundred million transistors. It is recognized that functional verification remains a major bottleneck of the design process, accouting for 70% of its overall costs. Functional verification by simulation is a way of finding bugs by deriving functional tests (testbench drivers) while attempting to reach functional coverage goals for the design. Finding corner-case bugs with simulation is often inefficient due to the limited controllability of the design through the testbench drivers. Writing a directed test to exercise a specific behavior can be challenging and time-consuming. Waiting for a constrained-random simulation to exercise the same behavior can also take a long time, with no guarantee that corner cases are really being exercised. In contrast, a formal verification tool can be very successful for finding difficult bugs. However, these tools are complex, they need huge resources (CPU time and memory), and they usually need specialized experts which limit their integration in the design flow. Recently, new formal and simulation based techniques has been developped to enhance the functional verification process. However, the rapid inreases in the design complexity makes it difficult to get rid of the presilicon bugs which have consistently increased for each new design generation. One way, to combat this verification bottlenck is to combine multiple, complementary techniques so that their combined strength is superior to the sum of the individual technques. In this research program, we address the development of hybrid verification tools and techniques to achieve the higher verification coverage of real-size microelectronics designs in a practical way. We believe that our approach will advance the state-of-the-art in systems verification, thus enhancing the shortening the design cycle. The direct beneficiary of this research will be the Canadian microelectronics industry. Furthermore, this proposal will contribute towards the training of a number of skilled personnel available to Canadian industry and academy.