Mentor Graphics teams with Infineon to deploy state-of-the-art verification

WILSONVILLE, USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. has successfully supported Infineon to improve Infineon’s verification productivity and effectiveness by assessing the status quo and by jointly establishing improved SystemVerilog (SV) methodologies.

Mentor supported Infineon in this deployment based on Mentor’s functional verification solutions. The cornerstone of Infineon’s new verification environment is the Questa functional verification platform. The technologies linked with the Questa platform, when applied with the established methodologies, improve Infineon’s verification process.

“Infineon has the challenge of ensuring that closure is achieved on complex designs that span multiple time zones and multiple teams on a tight schedule. We knew in advance that we needed to make the most of every verification cycle in order to achieve our goal,” said Hartmut Hiller, vice president, Design Methodologies & Implementation at Infineon.

“We jointly worked with Mentor to improve our advanced environment that allows for the electronic association of verification requirements through every stage of the process, linking formal results, low-power results, simulation results and coverage information into a single data base.”

This unified database was analyzed within the Questa environment to automatically determine if closure was reached. Mentor worked closely with Infineon in an assessment of the status quo and the identification of the gaps compared to Infineon’s solid vision of the desired verification environment based on industry standards such as OVM and SystemVerilog. Mentor then contributed tools, methodology, and know-how to support Infineon to achieve its vision. The results are already being applied on Infineon designs.

Improving functional verification
To facilitate the work, Mentor supported Infineon in creating a verification architecture document that described the overall strategy, architecture and implementation approach that would be taken to build the verification infrastructure.

The verification strategy document defined the general methods, layers, phases, components, libraries, scripts, databases, tools, and decisions that would be used throughout the verification effort. With the fully documented verification plan, the teams had a clear picture of how to:

* Build reusable verification components for each of the design under test (DUT) interfaces,
* Incorporate non-intrusive UPF-based power-aware logic within the verification environment,
* Incorporate automatic formal technology to ease the process of identifying the type of bugs found via formal techniques,
* Incorporate verification metrics like assertion density, functional coverage, bug tracking, test ranking, test sorting, and test merging to provide useful information about the verification status, and how to monitor real verification progress in terms of the effectiveness of each test,
* Build a series of pseudo-random test case sequences via a combination of constraints and object oriented programming (OOP) extensions within an OVM testbench, to find bugs and exhaustively verify the functionality of the DUT.

The results
Infineon, working together with Mentor, has further refined their advanced verification process to a state-of-the-art process. The process structure provides visibility and predictability into the entire verification process, which provides confidence in the verification status of a design. The process is expected to show significant productivity gain as it first focuses on what is needed, and then selects the right tools for the job. This approach also enables reuse.

The addition of Questa’s power aware and automated formal technology is exposing power related and critical corner case issues much earlier in the verification process.

“Independent of company size, design type or end-user market, companies verifying complex IC are facing a mounting number of functional verification challenges,” said John Lenyo, general manager, Mentor Graphics.

“The effective deployment of advanced verification tools and processes is required to address the complexities raised by today’s complex ASICs and SoC designs. We are pleased to partner with companies such as Infineon, where the result of our efforts is a more effective verification solution than either party could have implemented on their own. We are looking forward to continued work with Infineon to ensure their verification environment continues to be the best the industry has to offer.”