UPF-Aware CDC Structural Verification on RTL
Diana Kalel, Jean-Christophe Brignone, Irene Serre, Julian Massicot, Jerome Avezou · 2023
Current ICs (Integrated Circuits) include millions-of-gates IPs (Intellectual Properties) that interface to each other through multiple asynchronous clock domains. Therefore, to ensure the correctness of the asynchronous communications, exhaustive CDC (Clock Domain Crossing) structural verification must be performed. The target of this verification is to detect all possible CDC paths present in a design. This requires all clocks to be well defined and concurrently propagated. Including the UPF (Unified Power Format) file is crucial for such a verification. The presence of these low-power components poses a new challenge for the CDC structural verification. However, their absence risks masking a considerable number of CDC problems. An open Tcl tool allowing the elaboration of additional and custom features is used to demonstrate how our approach increased the QoR (Quality of Results) compared to the native platform.