Simulation offers us a way of checking the design is doing what we expect, but that is almost exactly why simulation on its own isn’t enough. When we simulate we are testing what we expect to happen. The problems happen when your design experiences something outside the expected.

There are a couple of extra tools we can use to increase our confidence that the design will work as designed.

Coverage

A coverage tool tests how complete your simulation or verification efforts actually are. I’m only aware of one free coverage tool we can use for HDL, and that’s Symbiotic EDA’s mcy.

Formal Verification

Formal verification offers the opportunity to prove various properties of your design. For example, in the multi project harness, I wanted to prove that when the design is in reset the outputs are all undefined.

I can do that by adding an assertion to my design:

if(&reset)
    assert(gpio_out == 10'bz);

Then I run a tool that uses a solver to prove that this assertion will always hold. If there is any way it can fail it will produce a short trace called a counter example. Even though this example is very simple it’s good to know that if I do something that accidentally messes up this property the assertion will fail, alerting me.

I have made a short course on Formal Verification for Symbiotic EDA you can follow here: