Chassis: a platform for verifying pmu integration using autogenerated behavioral models

Abstract

Power Management Units (PMUs) are large integrated circuits consisting of many predesigned mixed-signal components. PMU integration poses a serious verification problem considering the size of the integrated circuit and the complexity of analog simulation. In this article we present an approach for automatic generation of behavioral models for PMU components from top-down skeleton models, fitted with parameter values estimated by bottom-up parameter extraction algorithms. It is shown that replacing PMU components with these autogenerated hybrid automata-based abstract behavioral models enables significant simulation speedup (> 20X on our industrial test cases) and helps in early detection of integration errors. The article also justifies the level of accuracy in our models with respect to the goal of verifying integrated PMUs. The approach presented in this work is implemented in the form of a tool suite called Chassis.