Using Control Logic Drivers for Automated Generation of System-level Portable Models

PSS, portable stimuli, portable models, Universal Verification Methodology (UVM)

Portable Test and Stimulus Standard is a new Accellera standard for an abstract definition of the verification intent that can be used for stimuli generation for different types of verification environments and at different levels of design hierarchy. Despite the idea behind the standard is clear and well received by the general public, there is still a lot of work to make the magic happen inside of the interpretation tools. In this paper, we focus on vertical reuse of portable models which is basically about adapting portable models for block-level designs to portable models defined at the subsystem or system-level. This adaptation is usually based on manually defined (sub)system-level control restrictions and resources sharing restrictions. Our goal is to define algorithms which do transformations of portable models so as the restrictions are automatically added or suggestions for the user are made. In our first experiments, we focus on building control restrictions based on the control logic drivers extracted from the subsystem-level design.  We present our first results on the floating-point unit and RISC-V processor-based subsystem as they fit to represents the vertical reuse in a clear manner.