EAST: Efficient Assertion Simulation techniques

In the context of simulation-based verification, the Assertion-based Verification (ABV) methodology has become the technology of choice, with increasing proliferation of Verification / Assertion IPs for most commonly used protocols. To support the ABV flow, current generation simulators typically create threads for the assertions and evaluate each assertion separately by converting them into finite state automatons and monitoring their states during simulation. In this paper, we propose a different technique for assertion evaluation in a simulation-based verification flow. The proposed technique, EAST (Efficient Assertion Simulation Techniques), handles assertions in groups, instead of examining them in isolation, and achieves significant performance benefits. To this effect, our algorithm has a preprocessing phase (prior to simulation) which creates a shared data structure from the set of assertions using some simple rules, based on the assertion language operators. This is attached with the simulator and during simulation, at each evaluation cycle, EAST infers the decision of the assertions by a combination of lookup and substitution. We present our proposal using Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) assertions in this paper. Our prototype, EAST, achieves promising performance numbers in terms of both runtime and peak memory for both random and standard benchmark protocol designs.