Stimulus and Response

Summary

In this chapter, I have described how to use bus-functional models to generate stimulus and monitor response. The bus-functional models were used to translate between high-level data representations and physical implementation levels. They also abstracted the interface operations, removing the testcases from the detailed implementation of each physical interface. Some of these bus-functional models can be very complex, depending on feed-back from the device under verification to operate properly or having to supply handshake information back to the device.

This chapter, after highlighting the problems with visual inpection, also described how to make each individual testbench completely self-checking. The expected response must be embedded in the testbench at the same time as the stimulus. Various strategies for determining the expected response and communicating it to the output monitors have been presented.