Functional verification of the superscalar SH-4 microprocessor

Functional verification of modern complex processors is a formidable and time consuming task. In spite of substantial manual effort, it is extremely difficult to systematically cover the corner cases of the control logic design, within a short processor design cycle. The SH4 processor is a dual issue superscalar RISC architecture with extensive hardware support for 3D graphics. We present the development of a semi automated methodology for functional verification. In particular, we elaborate a scheme to automatically generate test programs to verify the superscalar issue logic, bypass/multi bypass logic and stall logic, starting from the microarchitectural specification. Finally, we present the Random Test Generation methodology and the specific Random Test Generators.