UVM Verification of an SPI Master Core

In today’s world, more and more functionalities in the form of IP cores are integrated into a single chip or SOC. System-level verification of such large SOCs has become complex. The modern trend is to provide pre-designed IP cores with companion Verification IP. These Verification IPs are independent, scalable, and reusable verification components. The SystemVerilog language is based on object-oriented principles and is the most promising language to develop a complete verification environment with functional coverage, constrained random testing and assertions. The Universal Verification Methodology, written in SystemVerilog, is a base class library of reusable verification components. This paper discusses a Universal Verification Methodology based environment for testing a Wishbone compliant SPI master controller core. A multi-layer testbench was developed which consists of a Wishbone bus functional model, SPI slave model, driver, scoreboard, coverage analysis, and assertions developed using various properties of SystemVerilog an the UVM library. Later, constrained random testing using vectors driven into the DUT for higher functional coverage is discussed. The verification results shows the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed verification environment