Assertion-Based Functional Consistency Checking between TLM and RTL Models

Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) is promising for functional validation at an early stage of System-on-Chip (SoC) design. However, raising the abstraction level brings a major challenge - how to guarantee the functional consistency between TLM specifications and Register Transfer Level (RTL) implementations? This paper proposes an efficient mechanism for functional consistency checking using assertion observability. The experimental results using several industrial designs demonstrate that our method can automatically check the functional consistency between different abstraction levels.