A Firmware-Based Co-Verification Platform for SoC

Full-system emulation on FPGA is an effective way for rapid verification of platform-based SoC design.However, FPGA emulation requires complete implementation of key modules and provides weak visibility.It is time-consuming to perform hardware design error localization and design verification.This paper proposes FCVP, a firmware-based co-verification platform, to enable earlier full-system verification and to shorten the verification cycle with FPGA.Based on programming interfaces in firmware, FCVP enables simulation of DUT (design under test) modules and execution of real-world workloads on FPGA directly.Moreover, FCVP helps locate design errors through comparing behavior traces, generated when accessing FPGA DUT module and its simulation model respectively.The practical PKUnity86 SoC verification example demonstrated that FCVP allows early-stage SoC design verification, and also helps identify design errors effectively.In addition, evaluation results show that FCVP achieves better performance than software simulator.