How Do You Find a Bug in a Billion-Transistor Chip?

Modern System-on-Chip (SoC) designs contain billions of transistors and integrate processors, memory controllers, high-speed interfaces, security engines, and many other complex components. With this level of complexity, how do engineers find a tiny design bug before the chip is manufactured? This presentation introduces the fascinating world of Design Verification (DV) and explains how engineers verify complex semiconductor designs before they become physical silicon. Using practical and student-friendly examples, we will walk through the journey from a design specification to test planning, simulation, stimulus generation, checking, coverage, and finally debugging failures. We will also discuss how technologies such as SystemVerilog, UVM, assertions, emulation, and automation help engineers uncover difficult bugs hidden inside increasingly complex SoCs.

Speakers: Thrinadh Dasyam and Christina Schuler, Intel