Unit information: Design Verification in 2012/13

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Unit name Design Verification
Unit code COMSM0115
Credit points 10
Level of study M/7
Teaching block(s) Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12)
Unit director Professor. Eder
Open unit status Not open
Pre-requisites

Programming Skills and Software Engineering Skills Knowledge of basic Computer Architecture.

Co-requisites

None

School/department Department of Computer Science
Faculty Faculty of Engineering

Description including Unit Aims

This unit introduces students to theoretical and practical aspects of design verification with a focus on HDL chip design. It starts with an overview of all the various verification techniques and explores their limits. We then focus on two major topics: Testing and Property Checking. Testing covers the use of simulators and assertions during simulation, building a test bench, collecting and measuring coverage. Property Checking investigates how to generate properties from a specification, system considerations involving abstraction and decomposition and the use of higher-order properties. We employ practical property checking languages and study formal property checking tools. The course concludes with a series of lectures on design and verification flow and risk assessment, including how to devise an appropriate verification strategy, how to write a verification plan and how to decide when a design can be signed off. Unit Aim: This unit familiarises students with the methods, techniques and techniques used in the design verification process, and gives them the technical background plus some of the practical skills expected from a design verification engineer.

Reading and References

Janick Bergeron Writing Testbenches: Functional Verification of HDL Models First Edition, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, ISBN: 0-7923-7766-4 Second Edition, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003, ISBN: 1-4020-7401-8