Experiences Teaching Functional Verification Techniques with Practical Designs

With the growing complexity of modern VLSI designs, functional verification has become one of the bottleneck meeting the time-to-market requirement. Despite the high number of courses offered in recent years in functional verification (FV), we could not find a course covering all aspects of FV, especially in training students gaining hands-on experience of both commercial and academic tools with industrial designs. In this paper, we describe the activities at the National University of Defense Technology (College of Computer Science & Technology) in providing a course for graduate students in FV. Our goal in designing this course is to provide a strong theoretically and practical background to students by covering all aspects of FV, and experience verification with practical designs.