Configuration Register Validation

Abstract

Increasing design complexity, shrinking time to market, and high cost of fixing a bug in a released product make pre-silicon validation of microprocessors a major ingredient in the product development cycle. The complexity and hence the cost of validating a microprocessor increases from one generation to the next, making it a very important and challenging problem for current and future designs.

HW/SW interaction of any microprocessor relies on an accurate implementation of the specification which can be obtained with the help of Boot sequences, Device Driver functionality and Control & Status. These processes are done by different register programming of the microprocessor.

Configuration Register (CR) Validation refers to 'Attributes Validation' of all the registers present in the microprocessor. Attributes that needs to be covered for validation are all the properties of a register that are supposed to be obeyed by it, except functions that it triggers upon configuration of it.

Some of the key challenges to the CR Validation are large number of registers under validation, ultra complex attributes of registers. This report introduces type of configuration registers, basic validation environment required to validate them, attributes complexities and subsequent verification complexities and optimal approach to address this problem at different steps of validation.