Static scheduling of multidomain circuits for fast functional verification

Abstract

Abstract-With the advent of system-on-a-chip design, many application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) now require multiple design clocks that operate asynchronously to each other. This design characteristic presents a significant challenge when these ASIC designs are mapped to parallel verification hardware such as parallel cycle-based simulators and logic emulators. In general, these systems require all computation and communication to be synchronized to a global system clock. As a result, the undefined relationship between design clocks can make it difficult to determine hold times for synchronous storage elements and causality relationships along reconvergent communication paths. This paper presents new scheduling and synchronization techniques to support accurate mapping of designs with multiple asynchronous clocks to parallel verification hardware. Through analysis, it is shown that this approach is scalable to an unlimited number of domains and supports increasingly large design sizes. To prove the effectiveness of the authors' approach, developed algorithms have been integrated into the compilation system for a commercial multi-FPGA logic emulation system. For three designs mapped to a logic emulator using this software environment, modeling fidelity is maintained and performance is enhanced versus previous manual mapping approaches. A theoretical analysis based on Rent's rule validates the scalability of the approach as device sizes increase.