Acceleration of Functional Verification in the Development Cycle of Hardware Systems

Functional verification is a widespread technique for checking whether a hardware system satisfies a given correctness specification. The complexity of modern computer systems is rapidly rising and the verification process takes significant amount of time. It is a challenging process to find appropriate acceleration techniques. I introduce a strategy for acceleration of functional verification using FPGAs by targeting special components of the verification environment to the FPGA.The second approach utilizes genetic algorithm in order to optimize and automate a technique called coverage-driven verification.