Research On Synchronization Technology Of Distributed And Parallel Verification Platform

Efficient functional verification is a critical step to the design, which can effectively shorten the design cycle and reduce the cost of design. With the large-scale integrated circuit manufacturing develop rapidly and a wide range of applications on the system design put forward a large number of new requirements. Digital system design has become more complex. Traditional stand-alone verification method has been difficult to meet the requirement of functional verification about the verification time, computing and storage resources. Distributed and parallel verification can meet the requirement of the large-scale and complex system for the resource, and it can improve simulation speed to reduce the time spending on the verification. Distributed and parallel verification has become the trend of verifying and has a good prospect for its advantages. Synchronization technology of distributed and parallel verification is used to maintain state consistency and to obey the causality constraint. Therefore it is the key technology that provides the prerequisite and basis for implementing distributed and parallel verification.Two classic distributed and parallel simulation protocols, especially the CMB and Time Warp algorithm, are researched firstly in this paper. Some main aspects of the protocols are analyzed, including principle, synchronization mode and performance. On the base of analysis of the distributed and parallel verification platform and the research about the classic algorithms, the time of next step-based appointment (TNSA) synchronization algorithm is proposed. Then the principle, data structure and basic flow of this algorithm are described and the main overheads are analyzed. Based on the TNSA algorithm, the synchronization mechanism and communication system be constructed, this thesis implement a synchronization environment for the distributed and parallel verification platform. Three evaluations which represent different applications have been done by using tens of million gates circuit. The simulation results show that the synchronization environment can get efficient speedup in less consumption of resource. The results of evaluations demonstrate the advantages of the distributed and parallel verification and the analyses on it provide the basis for further improving the synchronization environment performance.