High Definition Video SoC Verification

Executive Summary

Our customer is a fabless semiconductor company, creates solutions for digital media convergence.

The SoC had HD Video transcoding, encoding, decoding and scaling features. The SoC consisted of 400 MHz CPU, Video I/O Interfaces, Audio I/O Interface Ports (I2S Interface), Single Lane PCIe Bus interface, PCI Bus interface, On-The-Go USB2.0, Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) (Motorola SPI/TI SSP/National Microwire), I2C Interface, Serial Ports (UARTS), General Purpose IO, 8 bit NAND and NOR FLASH Interface, 16 or 32-bit DDR2 Memory Interface.

Customer was looking at outsourcing verification of SoC since they did not have in-house expertise and also proven methodologies providing comprehensive verification coverage. Also customer’s interests were to save cost and at the same time accelerate SoC development.

eInfochips team worked closely with customer to perform sub-system level verification of various blocks of SoC with HW/SW co-verification techniques. Also eInfochips helped customer to focus on product development by taking complete ownership of the verification and at the same time helped them to achieve 100% code coverage and cost.

The Customer

Our customer is a fabless semiconductor company, creates solutions for digital media convergence.

The Challenge

  • Integrating third party peripheral IP core with their corresponding PHY posed a major challenge
  • Verifying sub-system, shared by other sub-blocks of SoC posed a major challenge. e.g. verifying memory bus sub-system to achieve 100% code coverage before other sub-modules were designed. This activity itself posed the major challenge in the absence of other sub-blocks in SoC in terms of generating and controlling stimulus and verifying the response

The Solution

eInfochips team worked on the following aspects as part of the verification engagement

  • Performed functional verification of various sub-systems of SoC like memory bus sub-system, register bus sub-system, flash controller, interrupt controller and video pipe blocks
  • Leveraged third party verification IP cores into verification environment to check integration of various IP blocks for peripherals like PCI, PCIe and USB
  • Developed verification components for video interface, I2S and other miscellaneous IO like GPIO, UART, I2C and SPI
  • Developed SoC monitors and checkers for sub-system and system level functional verification
  • Developed test plan and test cases for all sub-systems of the SoC. Measured and analyzed code coverage for various sub-blocks of SoC
  • Ran netlist simulations for all sub-blocks of SoC and debugged functional failures on SoC netlist
  • Assisted customer in debugging board level bring up failures for various peripherals of the chip like PCIe and PCI

Technology

  • Industry: Video
  • Technology: PCI, PCIe, USB, I2C, GPIO, UART, SPI, I2S, BT 656
  • Languages: Verilog, Perl, C
  • Tools: VCS

The Benefit

  • eInfochips’ expertise in verification methodologies helped customer verify complex SoC design ahead of schedule
  • Customer saved approximately 50% of the cost by leveraging eInfochips' offshore model
  • Achieved 100% code coverage for all sub-blocks