Verification methodology of sophisticated automotive sensor interfaces integrated in modern system-on-chip airbag system

The tremendous growth in silicon integration capability in recent years, together with the increasing demand of safety requirements in automotive applications, led to the integration of single units, constituting an automotive airbag system into a single System on Chip (SoC) tailored to the specific application and characterized by the complexity of its digital core. The development of sophisticated digital algorithms for airbag peripheral sensor data decoding, processing and transmitting to the main airbag deployment event, requires also the development of more complex processes for the verification of these functionalities to meet the target of a first-time-right design, which is strongly demanded in the modern automotive electronics industry. In this context, the paper addresses the verification challenges of such complex SoC products and presents a novel verification setup suitable for the verification of complex automotive sensor interfaces integrated in a modern airbag SoC system interacting with analogue hardware with the aim to bridge the gap between "speed\´ and "accuracy" of classical simulation of complex ICs. The verification setup includes a full event-driven simulation at system level and an FPGA with an analogue test chip prototype for the acceleration of the verification. At an early phase (before product tape-out), the setup allows not only to verify the design against its specification, but also to verify the product in its application context - in-circuit verification, helping customers to gain confidence later at the system integration process. Therefore it significantly improves the quality of the whole design chain as well as the time-to-market.