一种快速并行协同仿真的验证方法

针对具有多个数字和模拟模块的混合信号SoC,提出了一种快速并行协同仿真的验证方法.在保证精度的前提下,该方法在很大程度上减小了验证难度,缩短了验证时间,很好地解决了系统的前端和后端SPICE验证的瓶颈问题.所提出的方法充分利用主流EDA工具,具有很强的硬件/硬件和软件/硬件协同仿真能力.对于用户来说,具有操作简单、容易实现的特点.同时,该方法也可用来验证具有全定制模块的数字电路.     

基于Cortex＿M3内核的SoC芯片软硬件协同验证平台设计实现

<正>片上系统(SystemonChip,SoC)一般包括可配置的通用IP核和用户自行设计的专用IP核组成的系统^[1]。SoC芯片的规模、复杂度和集成度日益增加，芯片验证的时间占据了整个研发周期的三分之二，验证的充分性有效地保证了芯片投片的成功率^[2]。在基于处理器IP设计构建出SoC芯片系统后，如何对系统架构和各功能进行验证的复杂度也在不断提高。在SoC芯片设计阶段的验证，通常分为两个阶段来进行验证。第一个阶段是在设计初期，使用软硬件协同仿真技术进行早期验证与开发，在此过程中主要是利用仿真技术对硬件系统功能进行验证以及设计漏洞的调试，是SoC设计中非常重要的环节。     

基于ARCA3 CPU的嵌入式SoC的FPGA原型验证

基于FPGA的验证是SoC功能验证的有效途径,建立一个基于FPGA的原型验证系统已成为SoC验证的重要方法.ARCA3是一种高性能、低功耗,国产的嵌入式微处理器.在ARCA3和AMBA架构上集成存储器控制器等IP核和外设,构建一个嵌入式SoC,并在FPGA上实现SoC的原型验证系统和软硬件协同验证环境.在FPGA原型机上运行Bootloader和操作系统,验证整个系统硬件的可操作性和软硬件之间的交互.基于FPGA的原型验证系统的实现可以快速验证基于ARCA3的各种抽象层次的IP核和开发基于ARCA3的软件应用.     

实现软件与硬件的真正协同

设计师们正在对一些新的设计方法进行评估，以期加快设计周期，缓解因新产品上市时间日趋加快带来的前所未有的重压。其中所建议使用的加速SoC设计周期的方法之一是硬件/软件的协同设计。拥有一种功能强大的协同设计工具可使设计理念大幅提升到系统级，从而改善硬件和软件设计小组之间的信息交流。同时它的使用还能有效地保护在RTL设计实现流程方面的现有投资。一些厂家已宣布，采用硬件/软件协同设计技术已使其设计时间减少一半，生产效率大为提高。那么，什么是真正的硬件/软件协同设计，它对设计小组又有怎样的意义？为此，本文将对硬…     

基于硬件的嵌入式SoC软硬件协同验证方法

本文介绍了在Riviera—IPT环境中进行基于ARM的SoC设计验证所需的技术背景。主要讨论包括关于嵌入式系统SoC的验证、ARM结构体系的基本描述；最后介绍如何利用Riviera—IPT完成基于ARM嵌入式系统的软硬件系统协同验证环境与流程。     

SoC软硬件协同验证中的软件仿真

介绍SoC(片上系统)软硬件协同验证中的软件仿真,给出验证UART(通用异步收发器)硬件接口的应用程序范例。利用GNU工具链开发SoC软硬件协同验证中的应用程序,并利用仿真器进行软件仿真,仿真结果正确。可以根据处理器的类型对GNU工具链进行配置,使开发流程适合所有GNU支持的处理器,方法具有一般性。根据开发者的具体需要,开发SoC芯片的应用程序用于软硬件协同验证。     

SoC设计领域的核心技术--软/硬件协同设计

基于IP库的SoC必将是今天与未来微电子设计领域的核心.它既是一种设计技术,也是一种设计方法学.一块SoC上一定会集成各种纯硬件IP,和作为软件载体的IP(MCU,DSP,等).因此,作为一种软/硬件平台,面向系统需求的软/硬件协同设计技术与方法一定是决定SoC设计成败的最关键因素.针对这一问题,本文从阐述软/硬件协同设计对芯片开发的关键作用开始,根据我们的研究与实践结果,具体详细展开讨论了如何针对不同的系统需求抽象,进行软/硬件规划与协同设计.     

浅谈SoC 设计中的软硬件协同设计技术

集成电路制造技术的迅速发展已经可以把一个完整的电子系统集成到一个芯片上即所谓的系统级芯片（System-on-chip,简称SoC)，传统的设计方法是将硬件和软件分开来设计的，在硬件设计完成并生产出样片后才能调试软件，本文介绍了针对于系统级芯片设计的软硬件协同设计技术（co-design)的概念和设计流程，同时借鉴实际设计经验讨论了软硬件协同设计中所需注意的技术问题。     

基于事务级软硬件协同仿真技术的研究

介绍了基于事务级的软硬件协同仿真技术的基本概念,提出了一种层次化的实现结构。该结构将事务级软硬件协同仿真功能进行逻辑划分,便于系统的模块化实现和功能扩展。并在电子科技大学研制的“CD6501型SoC软硬件协同验证系统”上对一个分组交换模块进行事务级软硬件协同仿真;通过测试,表明该分层结构能较好地完成事务级软硬件协同仿真任务,同时提高了协同仿真速度。     

复杂SOC的软硬件协同验证解决方案

为了提高产品的验证覆盖率和产品的首次成功率,验证工程师越来越多的使用固件、硬件诊断程序和其它软件部分作为实际嵌入式处理器的SoC验证的激励,以保证RTL设计与最终设计实现的的应用环境相同,并覆盖更为复杂的场景,但该RTL验证环境对软件调试的可视性比较有限。Mentor公司的Questa Codelink提供了独特的软硬件协同验证的技术可以让验证人员同时看到软件的执行情况和与软件同步的硬件波形,其回放模式减少了仿真等待的时间,可以快速追踪并定位到程序出错的地方。Codelink也提供了多核调试的技术,可同时看到软件在不同处理器的执行情况,极大地提高了多核验证的效率。     

一种在电路SOC验证接口设计方法研究

SoC已经成为嵌入式系统设计中的关键器件,验证又是SoC设计的关键环节,占用SoC设计过程中60%以上的时间.专用测试设备及JTAG接口等主流SoC验证手段不便于SoC在系统联调时的验证.本文介绍了一种在电路SoC验证接口的设计方法,这种验证方法弥补了主流SoC验证方法在系统验证的不足,提高了SoC验证的效率.     

嵌入式可重构系统芯片的硬件验证平台设计

提出一种新的基于嵌入武可重构系统芯片的视频解码方案,采用了软硬件协同验证的方法.设计了相应的硬件验证平台,验证了H.264解码算法在可重构处理器上的可实现性.     

一种新型多媒体SoC验证平台原理及其实现

提出了一种基于ADSP-BF537的新型多媒体SoC验证平台,以满足多媒体SoC音视频编解码功能模块的实时验证。介绍了整个平台的基本组成,以及BF537与SoC接口的软硬件设计;最后,以验证用于SoC的MP3硬件解码器模块为例,讨论了如何利用BF537,在多媒体SoC的FPGA原型内进行软硬件协同验证。该验证方案已经成功应用在深圳艾科创新微电子有限公司的一款多媒体SoC设计流程中。     

FPGA prototyping of a RISC processor core for embedded applications

Application-specific processors offer an attractive option in the design of embedded systems by providing high performance for a specific application domain. In this work, we describe the use of a reconfigurable processor core based on an RISC architecture as starting point for application-specific processor design. By using a common base instruction set, development cost can be reduced and design space exploration is focused on the application-specific aspects of performance. An important aspect of deploying any new architecture is verification which usually requires lengthy software simulation of a design model. We show how hardware emulation based on programmable logic can be integrated into the hardware/software codesign flow. While previously hardware emulation required massive investment in design effort and special purpose emulators, an emulation approach based on high-density field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices now makes hardware emulation practical and cost effective for embedded processor designs. To reduce development cost and avoid duplication of design effort, FPGA prototypes and ASIC implementations are derived from a common source: We show how to perform targeted optimizations to fully exploit the capabilities of the target technology while maintaining a common source base     

Digital Audio Effect System‐on‐a‐Chip Based on Embedded DSP Core

This paper describes the implementation of a digital audio effect system‐on‐a‐chip (SoC), which integrates an embedded digital signal processor (DSP) core, audio codec intellectual property, a number of peripheral blocks, and various audio effect algorithms. The audio effect SoC is developed using a software and hardware co‐design method. In the design of the SoC, the embedded DSP and some dedicated hardware blocks are developed as a hardware design, while the audio effect algorithms are realized using a software centric method. Most of the audio effect algorithms are implemented using a C code with primitive functions that run on the embedded DSP, while the equalization effect, which requires a large amount of computation, is implemented using a dedicated hardware block with high flexibility. For the optimized implementation of audio effects, we exploit the primitive functions of the embedded DSP compiler, which is a very efficient way to reduce the code size and computation. The audio effect SoC was fabricated using a 0.18 μm CMOS process and evaluated successfully on a real‐time test board.     

CoCentric系统设计、仿真与实现

集成电路已经发展到了SoC(System on Chip)时代，在系统设计领域就需要有相应的EDA工具的支持。CoCentric就是由Synopsys公司推出的SoC系统设计的EDA工具。CoCentric系统设计流程是由综合和验证这两个并行的流程组成的。综合着重实现从系统设计到最后硬件语言描述实现的过程；而验证则通过系统仿真来保证在综合过程中，系统的功能保持一致。文末还详细介绍了一个用CoCentric设计的SoC信息安全芯片的系统设计，并讨论了如何在这一系统中进行软硬件的划分。     

Guest Editorial Special Section on Design Verification and Validation

The 8 papers in this special section span a wide range of critical topics in verification including microprocessor validation, simulation-based equivalence checking, system-on-chip (SoC) verification, test generation and fault emulation.     

Hardware-accelerated design space exploration framework for communication systems

The efficient hardware implementation of signal processing algorithms requires a rigid characterization of the interdependencies between system parameters and hardware costs. Pure software simulation of bit-true implementations of algorithms with high computational complexity is prohibitive because of the excessive runtime. Therefore, we present a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based hybrid hardware-in-the-loop design space exploration (DSE) framework combining high-level tools (e.g. MATLAB, C++) with a System-on-Chip (SoC) template mapped on FPGA-based emulation systems. This combination significantly accelerates the design process and characterization of highly optimized hardware modules. Furthermore, the approach helps to quantify the interdependencies between system parameters and hardware costs. The achievable emulation speedup using bit-true hardware modules is a key enabling the optimization of complex signal processing systems using Monte Carlo approaches which are infeasible for pure software simulation due to the large required stimuli sets. The framework supports a divide-and-conquer approach through a flexible partitioning of complex algorithms across the system resources on different layers of abstraction. This facilitates to efficiently split the design process among different teams. The presented framework comprises a generic state of the art SoC infrastructure template, a transparent communication layer including MATLAB and hardware interfaces, module wrappers and DSE facilities. The hardware template is synthesizable for a variety of FPGA-based platforms. Implementation and DSE results for two case studies from the different application fields of synthetic aperture radar image processing and interference alignment in communication systems are presented.     

SoC interconnection protection through formal verification

The wide adoption of third-party hardware Intellectual Property (IP) cores including those from untrusted vendors have raised security concerns for system designers and end-users. Existing approaches to ensure the trustworthiness of individual IPs rarely consider the entire SoC design, especially the IP interactions through SoC bus. These methods can hardly identify malicious logic (or design flaws) distributed in multiple IPs whereas individual IPs fulfill security properties and can pass the security testing/verification. One possible solution is to treat the SoC as one IP core and try to verify security properties of the entire design. This method, however, suffers from scalability issues due to the large size of SoC designs with multiple IP cores integrated. In this paper, we present a scalable SoC bus verification framework trying to verify the security properties of SoC bus implementation where the bus protocol plays the role of the golden reference. More specifically, finite state machine (FSM) models will be constructed from the bus implementation and the trustworthiness will be verified based on the property set derived from the bus protocol and potential security threats. Along with IP level formal verification solutions, the proposed framework can help ensure the security of large-scale SoCs. Experimental results on ARM AMBA Bus demonstrate that our approach is applicable and scalable to prevent information leakage and denial-of-service (DoS) attack by verifying security properties.