Interface based hardware/software validation of a system-on-chip

The availability of reusable IP-cores, increasing time-to-market and design productivity gap, and enabling deep sub-micron technologies have led to core-based system-on-chip (SoC) design as a new paradigm in electronic system design. Validation of these complex hardware/software systems is the most time consuming task in the design flow. In this paper, we focus on developing an efficient interface-based validation methodology for core-based SoC designs. In SoCs designed with pre-validated IP cores, the verification complexity can be significantly alleviated by concentrating on the integration of the cores in the system, rather than the complete SoC. In this paper, we investigate typical interface problems that arise in integrating cores in an SoC, and classify these problems into different categories. Based on the classification of these interface problems, we introduce an interface-based validation methodology. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology using an example image compression SoC that we are developing.