Using SSDE for USB2.0 conformance co-verification

Keeping up with the increase in system design complexity requires the deployment of extensive engineering re-use technologies, so-called platform-based design techniques (Chang et al., 1999). When creating derivatives of such a complex systems-on-chip (SOC) platform, verification represents 70% of the overall cost. In this process, functional verification has become a huge obstacle. Engineers are assumed to know how to ensure conformance to an ambiguous specification by developing a million test vectors, which may represent only 50 milliseconds of real-time operation underlines Bob Payne, CTO Philips Semiconductors US (Scott et al., 2001). Moreover, software is playing an increasing if not dominant role especially in this platform derivative game, resulting in a burning need for a software and hardware functional co-verification solution at the integrated SOC level but also in the early intellectual property (IP) development cycles. In this paper we illustrate the use of SSDE for USB2.0 conformance co-verification.