Deployment of Formal Verification Methodology for AXI based Protocol for a Memory Model Verification

Abstract

AXI Protocol is an On-Chip Communication Protocol used for communication between different Intellectual Property blocks inside a System-On-Chip. With increasing logic density and a plethora of blocks interacting with each other, it becomes pertinent to not only verify the functional correctness of individual IP's but also to evaluate the integrity of transactions amongst each other. Simulation-based techniques fail to exhaustively assess all the kinds of transactions possible and primarily focus only on a few critical areas for AXI Protocol Verification. This paper proposes the integration of SystemVerilog Assertions coupled with Coverage model to verify the AXI Transactions from Master to Slave. This would aid in developing Verification Intellectual Property (VIP) helping in developing modular reusable components which can be leveraged across different verifications cycles. This paper demonstrates it empirically harvesting results relevant to building Assertion based verification, calculation of bus utilization factor and Coverage closure for RTL Signoff.