Uma abordagem para suporte à verificação funcional no nível de sistema aplicada a circuitos digitais que empregam a técnica Power Gating.

Abstract

The semiconductor industry has strongly invested in the development of complex systems on a single chip, known as System-on-Chip (SoC), which are extensively used in portable devices. With the many features added to SoC, there has been an increase of complexity in the development flow, especially in the verification process, and an increase in SoC power consumption. However, in recent years, the concern about power consumption of electronic devices, has increased. Among the different techniques to reduce power consumption, Power Gating has been highlighted for its efficiency. Lately, the verification process of this technique has been executed in Register Transfer-Level (RTL) abstraction, based on Common Power Format (CPF) and Unified Power Format (UPF) . The simulators which support CPF and UPF limit the verification to RTL level or below. At this level, Power Gating accounts for a considerable increase in complexity of the SoC verification process. Given this scenario, the objective of this work consists of an approach to perform the functional verification of digital circuits containing the Power Gating technique at the Electronic System Level (ESL) and at the Register Transfer Level (RTL), using a modified Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI) simulator. Four case studies were performed and the results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed solution.