Verification Based On BFM And Performance Evaluation Of WiMAX System

With the increasing complexity of IC design, SOC design becomes a mainstream technology. In SOC design, AMBA bus is one of the most widely used on-chip bus. In the actual SOC design, how to verify whether the physical interconnect of DUTs (design under test) obeys with the bus protocol and the evaluation of system performance is paid more and more attention to.In this paper, on ARM's AMBA bus is researched, focused on the two important issues encountered in the design of WiMAX terminal chips:1) How the problem of interconnect with the bus among the DUTs is quickly and effectively solved. In the Paper, BFM (Bus Functional Model) validate model which is designed based on OVM (Open Verification Methodology), compared with the BFM-based on RTL-level has the features of flexibility and reusability. The bus protocol of DUTs is verified for effective simulation with this BFM and the functional coverage is collected to make sure the interconnection of DUTs correct2) The system requires the processing for the real-time data and transmitting for a large amount of data, system performance must meet the data processing needs. Utilization of the bus is a standard measure of system performance. In this Paper, according to the characteristics of AMBA bus protocol, Parameters of algorithm which measures system performance are obtained by deduced from the theory. Performance of the system is evaluated by measurement method of hardware. Performance parameters measured is analyzed to find that the bottleneck of the system is that the storage device processing speed and performance seriously affects the overall system performance. Some appropriate performance improving methods is taken: such as using SRAM, improving the arbitration algorithm of the arbiter, optimizing the SDRAM controller. The performance of the optimized system compared with the original system is improved.