A Study on the Assertion-Based Verification of Digital IC

Verification plays more and more important role in complex VLSI design. It has two main challenges: one is to insure that the input stimulus can control the function spots inside the design; the other is to insure the errors can be observed from the design output. This paper presents an easy approach of assertion-based verification (ABV) method by dividing it into five steps, through which we embed assertions in source codes to monitor key functional spots of the design during simulation. As an application example, a case study of functional verification for a UART model, using System Verilog Assertion (SVA), is provided. The studied result shows that the new method is feasible and can be applied in the design and verification process to increase the observability of the design.