Method and apparatus for co-verification of digital designs

摘要

A method and apparatus for development and concurrent verification of digital designs including a combination of a microprocessor and discrete logic design blocks. The hardware/software design development and co-verification processing of digital designs is accelerated by placing the microprocessor in an FPGA device and logic circuits in an HDL simulator. The microprocessor and logic circuits are connected via a common bus and synchronization of both environments is achieved by using a simulator clock exclusively when both microprocessor and logic simulator need to communicate with each other. The system and method of the present invention provides a unique arrangement of a processor clocking scheme. An essential part of the invention is a clock switch responsive to the areas of RAM a processor is addressing and accordingly switching a clock signal to the processor from either a hardware clock generator or a software simulator.