A Research In The Technology Of The Function Verification For A Processor's Load-store Unit

Since the generation of the integrated circuit,the verification of IC design has been an important part of an integrated circuit design.So far,the cost of time and manpower in the verification has been much more than the design.What's more,with the increasing of IC design complexity,verification investment will increase further.In this paper,we take the load and store unit(LSU)of X microprocessor as the verification objection and elaborate the verification of the X microprocessor from three aspects: function point extraction,test environment construction and test vector generation.First of all,this paper extracts the function point of X microprocessor.According to the function of the load and store unit(LSU)and the related design documents,we extract the main function points of the LSU.A detailed description is made on the function points of access mode,endian,atomicity,memory attributes,access and so on.Secondly,this paper constructs a verification platform based on UVM.We illustrate UVM verification methodology from three main aspects:test generation,result checking,observation output and coverage collection which the verification faced to.And then,we set up a verification platform for the LSU verification.Finally,this paper studies the test generation technology based on genetic algorithm.compared with the random generation based on constraints method,the verification staff no longer need to write a large number of constraints.The method reducing the time and effort spent on verification,and then we can reduce time to makert of IC productors.