Leveraging IEEE 1850 PSL and Mixed-Signal Assertions for Post-silicon Verification of Automotive Power Devices

With the advent of new E/E architectures, autonomous driving and functional safety the amount of mixed-signal IC content in automobiles continues to rise. Consequently, post-silicon verification and validation accounts for a large portion of the development effort in these automotive smart power ICs. Unlike in fully digital devices there is no automated path to validate functionality of mixed-signal devices, which makes V&V a linear process in terms of effort, rising linear with the number of functional requirements to be covered. In the classical requirements-driven development flow each (human readable) requirement in the specification has to be converted to a machine-executable test and deployed afterward. Instead, formalization of functional requirements opens the path to automatic generation of tests out of functional requirements and thereby enables semi-formal verification. We present a post-Si targeted formalism of the IEEE 1850 Property Specification Language. We present results and examples from several automotive power and sensor devices.