Functional Verification Acceleration through the Removal of Redundant Simulation

The real-world challenge of verification is to meet a design’s testing requirements as quickly as possible without inhibiting the completeness of the verification effort. This paper introduces a new method, called the reduction of redundancy (ROR), which enables this goal. The stochastic nature of today's leading functional verification technique, directed random verification, can lead to wasteful redundancy during simulation because of a bias toward scenarios involving few stochastic decisions. By converting stochastic decisions into exhaustive ones, and using checkpointing to replicate the verification environment as needed, the ROR method works to defeat this bias. A brief look at the theory underlying this method is given and experimental results are shown for its application in real-world verification scenarios.