UVM BASED FUNCTIONAL VERIFICATION OF USB HOST

CONTROLLER IP
ABSTRACT

The ever increasing advancement in IC technology escalated the complexity of electronic

system designs, which in turn demands sophisticated verification procedures to ensure the
functional correctness of the same. This is indeed a challenging task which consumes around
70-80% of design resources in the design cycle of most design IPs. In order to overcome
these challenges, standardised methodologies incorporating a higher level of automation and
reusability are introduced in the functional verification procedure. The process involves the
generation of input stimuli in conformance with various functional operating conditions, and
the system response for each stimulus is measured and compared against the corresponding
response from a golden design model.
The project aims to develop Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) based Verification
Intellectual Property (VIP) for USB2.0 Host Controller using System Verilog language.
System Verilog is a combined Hardware Description Language (HDL) and Hardware
Verification Language (HVL) which proves to be advantageous in the verification of larger,
complex semiconductor designs since it provides a built-in support for advanced coveragedriven, constrained-random and assertion-based methodologies. UVM is a simulator vendor
independent methodology that brings about much automation to the digital verification world.
It offers base class libraries and its reconfigurable structure helps in improving the reusability
of various VIP blocks across different designs to accelerate the verification process. Universal
Serial Bus (USB) is an industry-standard extension which supports a wide range of devices.
With USB2.0 data rates of over 480Mbps is supported. The USB Host Controller is the USB
interface to the host through which actual communications take place. The project targets to
verify all the basic functionalities of USB2.0 Host Controller by validating various aspects of
data and control flow. It also attempts to verify the four different transfer types defined in
USB control, interrupt, isochronous and bulk transfers.