The Prototyping Verification Platfrom Establishment Based On FPGA For USB3.0

As the scale and complexity of integrated circuit design continues to increase, the verification of integrated circuit verification has become very difficult. The size of the chip has entered scale of the ten million and according to Moore’s Law:the size of the chip is still dubling every two years. To complete the chip verification, the complexity of verification at the rate of increasing is almost double the complexity of chip design. With chip function becomes more complex, the verification of chip is becoming more difficult. In the IC design industry, people studied more. Software-based simulation, simulation based on hardware on hardware acceleration, hardware-based verification and FPGA-based prototyping verification had been proposed one after another. Verification of software-based simulation is too slow. The speed in Verification based on hardware acceleration has increased, but still not very more compared to the last two. The speed of hardware-based Verification is the fastest, but it is very expensive. The speed of FPGA-based verification is faster compared to the first two. FPGA verification environment is very close to the real environment of the chip design.Firstly, the paper introduces the two main verification methods, formal verification and functional verification. Formal verification has three methods: equivalence checking, model checking, Theorem Proven. Theory and application of formal verification is introduced in detail and their advantages and disadvantages are analyzed. Functional verification has four methods:software-based simulation, simulation based on hardware acceleration, hardware-based verification and FPGA-based prototyping verification. Similarly, theory of verification, flow of verification, advantages and disadvantages of this method are analyzed in detail.Based on the above analysis, a prototype verification platform based on FPGA is founded. It is used for USB3.0verification. Based on design requirements, we used EP4SGX530which is product of Altera Company. Around the FPGA, there is TUSB1310which is product of Ti Company for usb3.0physical layer. In terms of versatility, we choose a lot of universal chips. In order to increase the reliability of FPGA platform, we analysis the problem of board-level design and give the corresponding solutions. In the paper, we talk about multi-FPGA verification platform. We introduced interconnect structure which is a key point of multi-FPGA verification platform in detail and compare kinds of interconnection structure.At last, we provide the flow of FPGA verification, the part need to change from IC design to FPGA design and methods of debug used for this FPGA verification platform.