Equivalence Verification of FPGA and Structured ASIC Implementations

Structured ASICs have recently emerged as a mid-way between cell-based ASICs with high NRE costs and FPGAs with high unit costs. Though the structured ASIC fabric attacks mask and other fixed cost it does not solve verification, particularly physical verification issues with ASICs or logic errors missed by simulation which would require re-spins. These can be avoided by testing in-system with an FPGA and migrating the FPGA design to a closely coupled structured ASIC fabric. Here we describe a practical methodology for a fast, push-button, and thorough verification approach tying an FPGA prototype to a matching structured-ASIC implementation for cost-reduction. Our focus is the equivalence verification between the respective revisions of a design, including netlist, compiler settings, macro-block parameters, timing constraints, pin layout and resource count.