Are IEEE 1500 Compliant Cores Really Compliant to the Standard ?

Abstract

International audienceThe IEEE 1500 Standard for Embedded Core Testing proposes a flexible hardware test wrapper architecture for supporting the test of modern System-On-Chip. The verification of the compliance of an embedded core to the standard is a major challenge for both core-integrators and core-users. In this paper we propose an IEEE 1500 SECT verification framework based on a commercial functional verification suite allowing: (i) the design of reusable verification components; (ii) the verification of a critical part of the standard using an embedded interface with a commercial simulator; (iii) the use of functional coverage metrics to measure the quality and completeness of the verification process. The paper also presents the application of an implementation of the proposed framework to the validation of a benchmark SoC. The main outcome of this paper is a verification component to insert in a global SoC Verification Strategy