Hardware Implementation of SystemVerilog Assertions Towards Efficient Processor Functional Verification: Methods, Tools and Platform

Processor verification occupies more than 70% of the time in the processor development flow, so it is necessary to optimize the efficiency of the processor verification process. Traditional verification methods such as software simulation provide various verification mechanisms including assertions to improve the fine-grained visibility and self-checking capability of verification, but software simulation runs slowly and lacks in efficiency. FPGA-based hardware simulation acceleration methods can greatly improve the verification performance, but debugging ability is weak, and it is difficult to locate the specific location and cause of vulnerabilities. In order to solve the above problems of verification efficiency and effectiveness, this paper proposes a method to automatically convert non-synthesizable SystemVerilog Assertion (SVA) into logically equivalent but synthesizable RTL circuits, focusing on assertions, which is a type of non-global modeling of the design, and vertically penetrates through the various levels of abstraction, and complements the verification capability of the global ISA-based model, which can be used to verify the design. This approach complements the global ISA model-based verification capability. At the same time, combined with the advantages of FPGA fine-grained parallelization and high scalability, the verification process of the processor is hardware-accelerated, which improves the development efficiency of the processor. In this paper, we implement an end-to-end hardware assertion platform, integrate a complete toolchain for hardware-enabling SVAs, and count the triggering and coverage of hardware-enabled assertions running on FPGAs. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves more than 20,000 times verification efficiency improvement compared to software simulation.