EFFICIENT SYSTEM-LEVEL FUNCTIONAL VERIFICATION METHODOLOGY

Miroslav Čupák - Francky Catthoor - Hugo De Man

   Today's multimedia applications represent complex systems implemented on a single chip. Industrial experiments show that the design of such applications has to start at the system-level in order to fulfill increasing requirements for low power and mininimum area of the final implementation. Typically, the reduction of power and area of the chip includes a number of sophisticated, but often manual optimisations applied on the initial specification. Such optimisations are very error-prone. Up to now, existing validation techniques have mainly concentrated on verification at lower levels of design abstraction. The verification at the system-level has not been fully covered, and certainly not for complex loop nests.

   In this paper, we propose a system-level methodology for the functional verification of loop oriented transformations, especially suited for multimedia applications. The methodology is based on a combination of two complementary existing techniques: formal verification of pure loop transformations and SFG-tracing technique for verification of correctness of arithmetic constructors and related control flow. The principles of our global methodology are illustrated on a verification example.

Keywords: functional formal verification, algorithmic code transformations, low-power design

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