Design of an automated validation environment for a radiation hardened MIPS microprocessor

Ever reducing time to market, along with short product lifetimes, has created a need to shorten the microprocessor design time. Verification of the design and its analysis are two major components of this design cycle. Design validation techniques can be broadly classified into two major categories: simulation based approaches and formal techniques. Simulation based microprocessor validation involves running millions of cycles using random or pseudo random tests and allows verification of the register transfer level (RTL) model against an architectural model, i.e., that the processor executes instructions as required. The validation effort involves model checking to a high level description or simulation of the design against the RTL implementation. Formal techniques exhaustively analyze parts of the design but, do not verify RTL against the architecture specification. The focus of this work is to implement a fully automated validation environment for a MIPS based radiation hardened microprocessor using simulation based approaches. The basic framework uses the classical validation approach in which the design to be validated is described in a Hardware Definition Language (HDL) such as VHDL or Verilog. To implement a simulation based approach a number of random or pseudo random tests are generated. The output of the HDL based design is compared against the one obtained from a "perfect" model implementing similar functionality, a mismatch in the results would thus indicate a bug in the HDL based design. Effort is made to design the environment in such a manner that it can support validation during different stages of the design cycle. The validation environment includes appropriate changes so as to support architecture changes which are introduced because of radiation hardening. The manner in which the validation environment is build is highly dependent on the specifications of the perfect model used for comparisons. This work implements the validation environment for two MIPS simulators as the reference model. Two bugs have been discovered in the RTL model, using simulation based approaches through the validation environment.