The Design And Implementation Of Transaction-based Verification In PMON Project

With the deep development of back-end technology, the design size of ASIC is increasing faster and faster. With exploding design sizes, we need to generate a large amount of high quality stimulus with a minimum of effort. Verification is getting more time-consuming as design complexity increases. But developing an effective test suite for an HDL design is an arduous and challenging process. Instead of creating a new language, Candence have designed an open-source C++ library, called testbuilder. Because many companies have already been using C/C++ in an ad-hoc manner to simulate designs via PLI/VPI, an open-source C++ library would eliminate the burden of maintaining an ad-hoc environment and would eventually allow integration of these ad-hoc environments into a platform for verification IPs reuse and exchange. Testbuilder combines the theories of OOP and transaction-based verification perfectly and now it has become the most popular method of verification.This paper summarized how to use a c++ library (testbuilder) to build an effective and reusable transaction-based verification environment based on the project of PMON. After the introduction of basic theory of verification in the first chapter, we will discuss the main characters of testbuilder and how to build a transaction-based verification environment base on the traditional verification method. In chapter three, we use testbuilder to build transaction-based verification environment to verify three hardware models in PMON project.After that, we will get our conclusion about the advantage of testbuilder comparing to traditional verification method. At last, we will summarize the rules of how to build an effective and reusable transaction-based verification environment.