Feature: Automotive
Emulators can then track and report that coverage. Applications that perform these tasks
help by abstracting the implementation specifics of the tests, making verification engineers more productive.
Figure 3: Emulation provides full-chip verifi cation
is a central reason for its success in markets that have long had to verify software on complicated SoCs. The automotive industry now joins that set of markets, making emulation a mandatory automotive verification tool. Emulators can be connected to
virtualised data sources for test stimulus. This makes test data deterministic and repeatable, unlike real-world data sources. Debug of issues, as well as the fixes needed to resolve those issues, can proceed much more quickly. Emulation is also about much more
than just logic functionality. Numerous other automotive issues can be addressed using the applications that run on the emulator, including: • Verifying that power remains within budget through the SoC’s various modes.
• Verifying and documenting the safety aspects of a SoC, in accordance with the ISO 26262 safety standard.
• Where silicon chips have internal test infrastructure (design-for-test, or DfT), emulation can be used to verify those circuits.
• All of these and other verification tasks contribute to full verification coverage.
At Siemens Emulators are part of Siemens’s higher- level automotive program called PAVE360 that brings together the many tools necessary for validating all of the electrical, electronic and mechanical elements of a vehicle. Whilst the Veloce emulator has a focus on silicon, the models and testbenches can be used for higher-level system and system-of- systems verification. That means that a SoC can be
confirmed to operate correctly, not only by a semiconductor provider in the context of its own testbench, but also by Tier-1 suppliers in the context of entire vehicle subsystems, providing much greater confidence when generating masks. As automotive electronics
increasingly continues to pervade every corner of a vehicle, emulators will be there to verify those systems and components, with the performance and capacity to handle the largest imaginable SoCs for many years.
Figure 4: One automotive program brings together tools necessary for validating all electrical, electronic and mechanical elements of a vehicle so an SoC can be confi rmed to operate correctly in the context of an entire vehicle subsystem
48 November/December 2020
www.electronicsworld.co.uk
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