The increasing complexity of system designs, increased investment required due to this complexity, and shortened product cycles have presented significant challenges to post-silicon design verification of chipsets. This is especially true with respect to high-end cache coherent non-uniform memory access (“ccNUMA”) chipsets where systems can be extremely large and complex. Processor post-silicon verification is typically focused on electrical verification at least as much as functional verification due to the large amount of full custom design. Chipsets present a different challenge due to the large number of cells of which they are comprised. Additionally, due to the sheer number of buses, internal bus arbitration, cache coherency control, queue arbitration, etc., in a large ccNUMA server, post-silicon functional verification of such a chipset consumes a greater amount of resources with respect to electrical verification than processors typically consume. Internal observability, while relatively simple in pre-silicon verification, poses a major obstacle to debug and functional test coverage.
Determining when system verification is complete is a second major obstacle to completing post-silicon verification in a time-effective manner. While pre-silicon simulation-based testing depends significantly on labor intensive directed and pseudo-random testing, post-silicon testing has historically depended on observing system operations that imply correct behavior.
Performing post-silicon design verification is an industry standard practice that facilitates exposure of bugs not typically uncovered in pre-silicon verification. Typical post-silicon bugs discovered include those that are manifested after long or at-speed operation of the system, those resulting due to incorrect modeling of hardware and firmware interfaces, those resulting from Register Transfer Language (“RTL”) errors that escaped pre-silicon detection, and those resulting from incorrect mapping of RTL-to-silicon (synthesis/physical bugs). Accepted methods of exercising systems to expose post-silicon bugs include running operating systems and software applications targeted for the final system, creating specific directed software tests that stress different portions of the system, and running software tests that create random system operations.
Real-time observability (“RTO”) refers to the ability to monitor and capture internal signals in real time either on- or off-chip. While internal signal observability features have been available in some field programmable gate array (“FPGA”) architectures and application specific integrated circuits (“ASICs”), they have typically been of limited scope. Limiting factors have been silicon area, wiring constraints, and I/O limitations. In addition, observability features have traditionally been used for debug and not functional test coverage.
Once an IC is designed, with or without any internal signal observability capabilities, there remains a need for the design to be tested. Verilog HDL is a Hardware Description Language (“HDL”). An HDL is a language used to describe a digital system, for example, a computer or a component of a computer. One might describe a digital system at several levels. For example, an HDL might describe the layout of wires, resistors, and transistors on an IC chip; i.e., at the switch level. In contrast, one might describe the logic gates and flip-flops in a digital system, i.e., the gate level. An even higher level describes the registers and transfers of vectors of information between registers. This is called the Register Transfer Level (“RTL”). Verilog HDL supports all of these levels.
Verilog is a discrete event time simulator. As will be recognized by those of ordinary skill in the art, in Verilog HDL, the execution of a procedural statement can be triggered on the occurrence of a named event. A record of the occurrence of events during a simulation is maintained as an “event log” in an “event log file”. A primary use of HDLs is the simulation of a design before the design is committed to fabrication. While several HDLs exist, none is known to support HDL events in the context of real-time observability of a digital system.