A Random Constrained Movie Versus a Random Unconstrained Movie Applied to the Functional Verification of an MPEG-4 Decoder Design

The advent of the new VLSI technology and SoC design methodologies has brought about an explosive growth to the complexity of modern electronic circuits. One big problem in the hardware design verification is to find good stimuli to make functional verification. A MPEG-4 decoder design require movies in order to make the functional verification. A real movie applied alone is not enough to test all functionalities, a random movie is used as stimuli to implement functional verification and reach coverage. This paper presents a comparison between a random constrained movie generator called RandMovie versus the use of a Unconstrained Random Movie. It shows the benefits of using a random constrained movie in order to reach the specified functional coverage. With such a movie generator one is capable of generating good random constrained movies, increasing coverage and simulating all specified functionalities. A case study for an MPEG-4 decoder design has been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.