A figure of merit for assertions in verification

Samuel Hertz, Debjit Pal, Spencer Offenberger, Shobha Vasudevan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Assertion quality is critical to the confidence and claims in a design's verification. In current practice, there is no metric to evaluate assertions. We introduce a methodology to rank register transfer level (RTL) assertions. We define assertion importance and assertion complexity and present efficient algorithms to compute them. Our method ranks each assertion according to its importance and complexity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our ranking for pre-silicon verification on a detailed case study. For completeness, we study the relevance of our highly ranked assertions in a post-silicon validation context, using traced and restored signal values from the design's netlist.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationASP-DAC 2019 - 24th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages675-680
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781450360074
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 21 2019
Event24th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, ASPDAC 2019 - Tokyo, Japan
Duration: Jan 21 2019Jan 24 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, ASP-DAC

Other

Other24th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, ASPDAC 2019
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityTokyo
Period1/21/191/24/19

Keywords

  • Assertion Ranking
  • Dependency Graph
  • PageRank

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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