Design, Soc, Fpga-based Verification Platform

With the rapid development of communication industry, more and more functions have been integrated to the mobile phone, such as MP3 player, MPEG4 player and digital camera etc. Because of these complex feature requirement, most of IC design companies use SoC technology to design mobile baseband chip.A typical SoC chip is a whole embedded system, which include CPU, DSP and memory etc. Because of the highly integration, it's very difficult to do the software and hardware co-verification in SoC design filed.The main purpose of this subject is to design a verification platform which can be used for SoC software and hardware co-verification. This platform is designed based on Altera Excalibur FPGA (with an ARM9 processor embedded). At the same time, the software engineer can develop and debug their system software on this platform before the real chip has been fabricated.The theories of EMC and signal integrity have been used as a PCB layout design guide to improve the performance of this verification platform, and some SI problems such as ring and crosstalk have been simulated. The simulation tool is Hyperlynx which is developed by Mentor Graphics co., ltd.After this FPGA verification board has been assembled, two software and hardware co-verification examples have been validated successfully, one is SDRAM controller, and the other is RGB LCD controller.