Clock and Reset Ubiquity: A CDC Verification Perspective

White Paper Abstract:

Today’s SoC integrates a collection of peripherals, memory, graphics, networking and I/O components that originate from a multitude of sources. It could comprise designs from within the company, from other companies or from third-party IP vendors. These independently developed components come together to enable a rich feature set for the SoC. However, accompanying this abundance of features is a significant amount of complexity that needs to be correctly and efficiently handled to render the integration successful.

One such source of complexity is that components operate at clock frequency ranges that may be very different from those of their counterparts. The existence of these multiple clock domains and the need for them to exchange information creates a hotbed for CDC bugs to thrive. As a result, CDC verification becomes critical to ensure that metastability is not introduced in the design. In this paper, we provide several situations with varying set of examples that showcase the challenges in CDC verification.

See also: Clock Domain Crossing Verification with Meridian CDC