Conclusion

While assertions can be a powerful addition to a design team's arsenal, they force designers to spend time early in the design process adding quality assertions. Design engineers may resist adding assertions because of tight time constraints and the complexity of the SVA language. In spite of the time savings for designers during the verification process, adding assertions to the design process has remained a hard sell.

Tools such as Zazz improve ease-of-use to the point that designers can now easily incorporate assertions into designs. The inclusion of high-quality assertions throughout the design will minimize not only the time spent debugging designs, but also the time spent communicating issues between the design and verification engineers. These same assertions may also detect "hidden" failures that do not propagate to an observable point that results in testcase failure, increasing the chances of finding such problems before tapeout.

The current mindset that assertions belong only in the verification process needs to change. As designers begin to understand that assertions are easy to incorporate early in the design process, design teams can realize the benefits of assertions throughout the entire design and verification process.

Video Tutorials

The remaining pages contain video tutorials showing how Zazz can be used to create the AXI assertions.