Asic Verification

-"Anything that can go wrong - Will"-Murphy

Now Lets start with an assumption that anything may go wrong

What are the various areas can things go wrong? - List down the areas in the flow that things can go wrong and derive a methodology to verify at each and every stage. - List down all your uncertainities that could potentially happen and how to model it and how to constrain and verify up-front.

Lets Explore and re-visit each and every area in the Design flow to cover potential risk Functional Verification (RTL level , Gate level) Formal Verification Static Timing Analysis Physical Verification Power Simulation Thermal Simulation Noise Simulation Test Simulation Emulation Hardware proto-type Hardware Software co-simulation Transistor level Simulation

Now lets Venture in to each area and insure it

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Functional Verification: - TLM(Transaction Level Modelling) - Linting - RTL Simulation ( Enivronment involving : stimulus generators, monitors, response checkers, transactors) - Gate level Simulation - Mixed-signal simulations - Regression

How Much Did I cover in the functional part - What is my Coverage Metric? and what are the methodologies used? - Is the verification tests covered pin-pointed tests or tests with random seeds to cover all the corner-cases. - Code-coverage - Line coverage - Functional coverage

Formal Verification: - Equivalence checkers RTL versus Gate Pre-layout versus post-layout Netlist Assertion based property checkers( Mathematical techniques to allow larger state space coverage )

Timing Verification: -

With whom the Chip is talking to (To know the Interface Timing's) What is the Timing-budgets with in the chip, and how to constrain it within each I.P. and finally ana How to address the timing targets with varying process parameters(on-chip variation) what is the o Steps to minimize the clock -jitter.

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Physical Verification:

Is my design process friendly ? DRC (Design Rule Check) LVS Antenna Checks ERC ESD checks Speed monitor's

Noise Simulation:

How Noisy is my design so need to perform noise simulations addressing these areas Simultaneous Switching Noise (SSN) Package Noise EMI Noise Power-ground noise Cross-talk noise Analog Noise Substrate noise

Power Simulations:

Is my design meeting power-targets IR drop analysis Dynamic power simulations

Power related methodologies

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Optimum location for De-caps Multiple Voltage domains Multi Vt design DVFS ( Dynamic Voltage and Frequency scaling) Clock-gating Techniques Power Management Unit (to shut-off when not required) Level-Shifters across cross-voltage domains

Thermal Simulations

Study the thermal targets and mechanism to reduce

Test Simulations

Is my design testable once chip comes out, methodologies to identify the problematic areas Boundary Scan Memory BIST simulations Tester specific vector generation and simulations Tester vector compression techniques to reduce tester time At-speed testing mechanism's Scan-shift and scan-capture methodologies IDDQ testing Wafer Level Burn-in Tests to know Known Good Dies(KGD) Wire pull tests DC parameter tests AC parameter tests Path-delay tests Delay tests Transition fault testing

Addressing DSM and Yield Issues Redundant via's Spacing non critical areas to be lithography friendly Wire widening

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Metal Filling Metal Slotting

Emulation:

Emulates the functional behaviour of the design. Synthesizable assertions are mapped to emulators to p

Hardware prototype:

Proto-typing the system requirements in a programmble FPGA's

Inspite of all the Verification design - Methodologies to reduce cost & time in the Methodologies and Strategies if things goes wrong, how to address Spare-gates Redundant rows/columns in the memories Redundant vias Built-in self repair memories Focussed Ion Beam Methodologies

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Note: In case if you wish to add more to this topic, please do send me mail to : [email protected]

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