A performance failure is generally not fatal because the system development can usually continue while the IC is re-spun for performance improvement. However, functional failures in a design can result into multiple design iterations (re-spins). These are usually at great expense in terms of non-recurring engineering costs (NRE) and missed market windows. "Top Level Verification" is one of the most critical challenges for our customers in mixed-signal verification. To ensure the reliability of the mixed-signal verification results, the first step is to integrate the analog and digital mixed signal environments. Figure 1 illustrates the integrated mixed-signal verification environment offered by Cadence Design Systems
Figure 1: Integrated Mixed Signal Verification Environment
Other mixed-signal verification challenges that customers have identified are:
Digital-Centric Mixed-Signal Verification
Cadence provides a digital-centric mixed-signal verification (DMSV) environment to address the verification challenges listed above. This verification environment targets customers using digital-centric use models. It refers to mixed-signal verification using digital simulators only. In another words, it delivers the mixed signal verification performance very close to digital speeds. This methodology is targeted for high performance mixed signal verification for full-chip verification. Due to its digital-centric use model, it can be targeted for high volume, digital-centric nightly regressions tests.
Digital-centric mixed-signal verification leverages Real Number Modeling (RNM) so that users can perform verification of their analog or mixed-signal designs using discretely simulated real number models. This allows the simulation to only use the digital solver, avoiding the slower analog simulation and thus enabling intensive verification of mixed signal design in short period of time. The tradeoff between simulation performance and accuracy has to be considered in the context. RNM also opens the possibility of linkage with other advanced verification technologies such as metric-driven verification without the difficulty of interfacing to the analog engine or defining new semantics to deal with analog values. Overall, the DMSV technology provides five key benefits to enable customers to perform a top level SoC verification:
1. A strong bridge between analog and digital environment
The DMSV technology builds a much needed bridge between analog and digital communities by providing them a model/mechanism that works seamlessly in their native environment. DMSV models are fully compliant with analog as well as digital verification environments. Their complete portability between the two environments eliminates the risk of any manual interventions or modifications to the designs to take them from one environment to other.
2. Compelling value addition to digital verification coverage
The DMSV models offer a much needed accuracy (of real numbers) in the digital verification environment. This allows for a much more accurate representations and verification of designs including multiple power-supply sensitivities. This allows for improved verification coverage for critical silicon bugs.
3. Performance improvement to analog design and verification process
The DMSV models provide a fast and reasonably accurate way to model analog behaviors. This allows users to perform full chip transistor level simulations by replacing some blocks with DMSV models to accommodate the capacity and speed requirements.
4. Enabling seamless integrations of blocks
DMSV technology provides key features like Coercion that allows for seamless integration of models/blocks written in various other languages/abstractions (such as SV-real, VHDL reals etc.) to be integrated and verified without needing any manual changes or painful design setups or workarounds.
5. Metric Driven Verification with DMSV
The DMSV technology enables a real number based more accurate metric driven verification by leveraging the digital verification environment, testbenches and monitoring methodologies like assertions and coverage.
DMS Option to Incisive Enterprise Simulator Technical Features include:
For more details, contact your local sales team or application engineer. Additional technical collateral as well as free, hands-on workshops are also available upon request.
Kishore Karnane / Abhi Kolpekwar
The issues not discussed here are
- Wreal model generation
- verification of the wreal model against the schematic
- additional resource required to develop and verify the wreal models
Using the schematics directly from the analog design team and simulating with them using incisive and AMS has it's limitations that you point out, but it reduces the barrier to entry for SoC teams to start performing mixed signal simulation.
Does the DMSV methodology help improve Mixed signal verification productivity as well as performance?