Assertion-Based Design

There is much excitement in the design and verification community about assertion-based design. The question is, who should study assertion-based design? The emphatic answer is, both design and verification engineers. What may be unintuitive to many design engineers is that adding assertions to RTL code will actually reduce design time, while better documenting design intent. Every design engineer should read this book! Design engineers that add assertions to their design will not only reduce the time needed to complete a design, they will also reduce the number of interruptions from verification engineers to answer questions about design intent and to address verification suite mistakes. With design assertions in place, the majority of the interruptions from verification engineers will be related to actual design problems and the error feedback provided will be more useful to help identify design flaws. A design engineer who does not add assertions to the RTL code will spend more time with verification engineers explaining the design functionality and intended interface requirements, knowledge that is needed by the verification engineer to complete the job of testing the design.

Table of Contents:
1 Introduction.- 1.1 Property checking.- 1.2 Verification techniques.- 1.3 What is an assertion?.- 1.4 Phases of the design process.- 1.5 Summary.- 2 Assertion Methodology.- 2.1 Design methodology.- 2.2 Assertion methodology for new designs.- 2.3 Assertion methodology for existing designs.- 2.4 Assertions and simulation.- 2.5 Assertions and formal verification.- 2.6 Summary.- 3 Specifying RTL Properties.- 3.1 Definitions and concepts.- 3.2 Property classification.- 3.3 RTL assertion specification techniques.- 3.4 Pragma-based assertions.- 3.5 SystemVerilog assertions.- 3.6 PCI property specification example.- 3.7 Summary.- 4 PLI-Based Assertions.- 4.1 Procedural assertions.- 4.2 PLI-based assertion library.- 4.3 Summary.- 5 Functional Coverage.- 5.1 Verification approaches.- 5.2 Understanding coverage.- 5.3 Does functional coverage really work?.- 5.4 Functional coverage methodology.- 5.5 Specifying functional coverage.- 5.6 Functional coverage examples.- 5.7 AHB example.- 5.8 Summary.- 6 Assertion Patterns.- 6.1 Introduction to patterns.- 6.2 Signal patterns.- 6.3 Set patterns.- 6.4 Conditional patterns.- 6.5 Past and future event patterns.- 6.6 Window patterns.- 6.7 Sequence patterns.- 6.8 Applying patterns to a real example.- 6.9 Summary.- 7 Assertion Cookbook.- 7.1 Queue—FIFO.- 7.2 Fixed depth pipeline register.- 7.3 Stack—LIFO.- 7.4 Caches—direct mapped.- 7.5 Cache—set associative.- 7.6 FSM.- 7.7 Counters.- 7.8 Multiplexers.- 7.9 Encoder.- Appendix A Open Verification Library.- A.1 OVL methodology advantages.- A.2 OVL standard definition.- A.2.1 OVL runtime macro controls.- A.2.2 Customizing OVL messages.- A.3 Firing OVL monitors.- A.4 Using OVL assertion monitors.- A.5 Checking invariant properties.- A.5.1 assert_always.- A.5.2 assert_never.- A.5.3 assert_zero_ one_ hot.- A.5.4 assert_range.- A.6 Checking cycle relationships.- A.6.1 assert_next.- A.6.2 assert_frame.- A.6.3 assert_cycle_sequence.- A.7 Checking event bounded windows.- A.7.1 assert_win_change.- A.7.2 assert_win_unchange.- A.8 Checking time bounded windows.- A.8.1 assert_change.- A.8.2 assert_unchange.- A.9 Checking state transitions.- A.9.1 assert_no_transition.- A.9.2 assert transition.- Appendix B PSL Property Specification Language..- B.1 Introduction to PSL.- B.2 Operators and keywords.- B.3 PSL Boolean layer.- B.4 PSL Temporal Layer.- B.4.1 Named SERE.- B.4.2 SERE concatenation (;) operator.- B.4.3 Consecutive repetition ([*]) operator.- B.4.4 Nonconsecutive repetition ([=]) operator.- B.4.5 Goto repetition ([->]) operator.- B.4.6 Sequence fusion (:) operator.- B.4.7 Sequence non-length-matching (&) operator.- B.4.8 Sequence length-matching (&) operator.- B.4.9 Sequence or (I) operator.- B.4.10 until* sequence operators.- B.4.11 within* sequence operators.- B.4.12 next operator.- B.4.13 eventually! operator.- B.4.14 before* operators.- B.4.15 abort operator.- B.4.16 Endpoint declaration.- B.4.17 Suffix implication operators.- B.4.18 Logical implication operator.- B.4.19 always temporal operator.- B.4.20 never temporal operator.- B.5 PSL properties.- B.5.1 Property declaration.- B.5.2 Named properties.- B.5.3 Property clocking.- B.5.4 forall property replication.- B.6 The verification layer.- B.6.1 assert directive.- B.6.2 assume directive.- B.6.3 cover directive.- B.7 The modeling layer.- B.7.1 rose() and fell() functions.- B.7.2 prey() and next() functions.- B.8 BNF.- B.8.1 Verilog Extensions.- B.8.2 Flavor macros.- B.8.3 Syntax productions.- Appendix C SystemVerilog Assertions.- C.1. Introduction to SystemVerilog.- C.2 Operator and keywords.- C.3 Sequence and property operations.- C.3.1 Temporal delay.- C.3.2 Consecutive repetition.- C.3.3 Goto repetition.- C.3.4 Nonconsecutive repetition.- C.3.5 Sequence and.- C.3.6 Sequence intersection.- C.3.7 Sequence or.- C.3.8 Boolean until (throughout).- C.3.9 Within sequence.- C.3.10 Ended.- C.3.11 Matched.- C.3.12 First match.- C.3.13 Implication.- C.4 Sequences and properties.- C.5 Assert and cover statements..- C.6 Dynamic data within sequences.- C.7 Templates.- C.8 System Functions.- C.9 SystemTasks.- C.10 BNF.- C.10.1 Use of Assertions BNF:.- C.10.2 Assertion statements.- C.10.3 Property and sequence declarations.- C.10.4 Property construction.- C.10.5 Sequence construction.

Review :
"By combining its three authors' extensive experience in engineering, applying, and standardizing assertions, this book provides a solid foundation for assertion-based logic design quality and productivity. It is mandatory reading by all computing product design teams. Teams that don't read and apply the assertion-based design ideas in this book will flunk out of the competition." (Lionel Bening, Hewlett-Packard - Co-Author of "Principles of Verifiable RTL Design")