Valeria Bertacco – författare

Scalable Hardware Verification with Symbolic Simulation presents recent advancements in symbolic simulation-based solutions which radically improve scalability. It overviews current verification techniques, both based on logic simulation and formal verification methods, and unveils the inner workings of symbolic simulation. The core of this book focuses on new techniques that narrow the performance gap between the complexity of digital systems and the limited ability to verify them. In particular, it covers a range of solutions that exploit approximation and parametrization methods, including quasi-symbolic simulation, cycle-based symbolic simulation, and parameterizations based on disjoint-support decompositions.

In structuring this book, the author’s hope was to provide interesting reading for a broad range of design automation readers. The first two chapters provide an overview of digital systems design and, in particular, verification. Chapter 3 reviews mainstream symbolic techniques in formal verification, dedicating most of its focus to symbolic simulation. The fourth chapter covers the necessary principles of parametric forms and disjoint-support decompositions. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on recent symbolic simulation techniques, and the final chapter addresses key topics needing further research.

Scalable Hardware Verification with Symbolic Simulation is for verification engineers and researchers in the design automation field.

 Highlights:

Functional Design Errors in Digital Circuits Diagnosis covers a wide spectrum of innovative methods to automate the debugging process throughout the design flow: from Register-Transfer Level (RTL) all the way to the silicon die. In particular, this book describes: (1) techniques for bug trace minimization that simplify debugging; (2) an RTL error diagnosis method that identifies the root cause of errors directly; (3) a counterexample-guided error-repair framework to automatically fix errors in gate-level and RTL designs; (4) a symmetry-based rewiring technology for fixing electrical errors; (5) an incremental verification system for physical synthesis; and (6) an integrated framework for post-silicon debugging and layout repair. The solutions provided in this book can greatly reduce debugging effort, enhance design quality, and ultimately enable the design and manufacture of more reliable electronic devices.

The purpose of this book is to survey the state of the art and evolving directions in post-silicon and runtime verification. The authors start by giving an overview of the state of the art in verification, particularly current post-silicon methodologies in use in the industry, both for the domain of processor pipeline design and for memory subsystems. They then dive into the presentation of several new post-silicon verification solutions aimed at boosting the verification coverage of modern processors, dedicating several chapters to this topic. The presentation of runtime verification solutions follows a similar approach. This is an area of processor design that is still in its early stages of exploration and that holds the promise of accomplishing the ultimate goal of achieving complete correctness guarantees for microprocessor-based computation. The authors conclude the book with a look towards the future of late-stage verification and its growing role in the processor life-cycle.