Verification Techniques for System-Level Design

Chapter 1. Introduction

Masahiro Fujita

In deep sub-micron technology, a large and complex system that has a wide variety of functionalities has been integrated on a single chip. It is called system-on-chip (SoC) or System LSI, since all of the components in an electronic system are created on a single LSI chip. SoC is now widely used not only in consumer electronics but also in various embedded systems. SoCs nowadays may comprise more than 10 million gates, and their designs are highly complicated and entail many manpower-consuming processes. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to identify all the design bugs in such a large and complex system before the chips are manufactured. If design bugs caused by the initial specification are ...