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Concept
Functional verification
Summary
Functional verification is the task of verifying that the logic design conforms to specification. Functional verification attempts to answer the question "Does this proposed design do what is intended?" This is complex and takes the majority of time and effort (up to 70% of design and development time) in most large electronic system design projects. Functional verification is a part of more encompassing design verification, which, besides functional verification, considers non-functional aspects like timing, layout and power.
Although the number of transistors increased exponentially according to Moore's law, increasing the number of engineers and time taken to produce the designs only increase linearly. As the transistors' complexity increases, the number of coding errors also increases. Most of the errors in logic coding come from careless coding (12.7%), miscommunication (11.4%), and microarchitecture challenges (9.3%). Thus, electronic design automation (EDA) tools are produced to catch up with the complexity of transistors design. Languages such as Verilog and VHDL are introduced together with the EDA tools.
Functional verification is very difficult because of the sheer volume of possible test-cases that exist in even a simple design. Frequently there are more than 10^80 possible tests to comprehensively verify a design – a number that is impossible to achieve in a lifetime. This effort is equivalent to program verification, and is NP-hard or even worse – and no solution has been found that works well in all cases. However, it can be attacked by many methods. None of them are perfect, but each can be helpful in certain circumstances:
Logic simulation simulates the logic before it is built.
Simulation acceleration applies special purpose hardware to the logic simulation problem.
Emulation builds a version of system using programmable logic. This is expensive, and still much slower than the real hardware, but orders of magnitude faster than simulation. It can be used, for example, to boot the operating system on a processor.
Official source
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