Design and Verification of On-Chip Communication Protocols

Modern computer systems rely more and more on on-chip communication protocols to exchange data. To tackle performance requirements these protocols have become highly complex, which makes their formal verification usually infeasible with reasonable time and effort. The authors present an initial case study for a new approach towards the design and verification of on-chip communication protocols. This new methodology combines the design and verification processes together, interleaving them in a hand-in-hand fashion. In the initial case study they present the design and verification of a simple arbiter-based master-slave communication system inspired by the AMBA High-performance Bus architecture. Starting with a rudimentary, sequential protocol, the design is extended by adding pipelining and burst transfers.