Design for verification at the register transfer level

In this paper we introduce a novel concept that can be used for augmenting simulation based verification at the Register Transfer Level (RTL). In this technique the designer of an RTL circuit introduces some well understood extra behavior (through some extra circuitry) into the circuit under verification. This can be termed as design for verification. During RTL simulation this extra behavior is utilized in conjunction with the original behavior to exercise the design more thoroughly thus making it easier to detect errors in the original design. Once the circuit is thoroughly verified for functionality the extra behavioral constructs can be removed to produce the original verified design. Extensive experiments on a number of industrial circuits demonstrate that the method is promising.