Feature: Automotive
Thorough pre-silicon verification of automotive SoCs
By Richard Pugh, Product Marketing Manager, Emulation Division, Mentor, a Siemens business
T
he advent of electrified and autonomous vehicles has enormous implications for the semiconductor market. The electrification of
vehicles, which addresses the need for better fuel economy and lower levels of noxious emissions, drives increased silicon content. Beyond this, electrified and
autonomous vehicles must be safe as dictated by the ISO 26262 standard. The risk of injury or death raises the stakes and expectations for components, subsystems and systems within the vehicle. This drives the need for far more thorough verification of every aspect of a vehicle, particularly those that affect safety-critical functions. More silicon will be needed, much of which will require a higher degree of verification. Te new silicon content will be far
more complex than previous islands of electronics and ECUs. Instead, it will involve systems-on-chip (SoCs) with vehicle-specific functions. Such SoCs will
act as platforms that allow Tier 1 suppliers and OEMs to differentiate and add value through a selection of silicon features and the use of soſtware that runs on the SoCs. This further complicates SoC
verification, since SoCs aren’t truly complete until software runs on them. Whilst a semiconductor company can’t thoroughly check the software that a Tier 1 supplier writes, it can ensure that the lowest-level software – drivers, which provide the higher-level software with access to the silicon – operates correctly as it interacts with the selected operating system (OS). No SoC can be said to be thoroughly verified until it has been exercised with an OS and driver executing higher-level test code.
Automotive SoC verification Specific verification challenges include: • SoCs will be large and complex, with multiple CPUs, artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and vision-orientated features.
• Extensive low-level software will need to be checked out.
46 November/December 2020
www.electronicsworld.co.uk
• Battery-operated vehicles mean that SoCs must consume energy judiciously, and their power characteristics must be verified.
• Numerous interfaces and protocols involving hardware and software will need to be verified.
• These SoCs will be large enough that, done poorly, verification would take far too long for commercial relevance. The chosen verification strategy must
be able to accommodate huge circuits running an OS and millions of lines of code. While a semiconductor company may verify the lower-level code, the verification methodology and model should be transferable to a Tier-1 supplier for integration into a larger system so that the higher-level software created can be verified. The older standard automotive flow
leverages four tools for ensuring systems operate correctly: • Virtual prototypes: these use high-level models of hardware behaviour prior to silicon availability. The models execute quickly, but their accuracy is
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