Functional verification of an MPEG-4 decoder design using a random constrained movie generator

The advent of the new VLSI technology and SoC design methodologies has brought about an explosive growth to the complexity of modern electronic circuits. As a result, functional verification has become a major bottleneck in any digital design flow. Functional verification has two major problems: choose good stimuli and measure coverage. This paper present a movie generator called RandMovie used together with a coverage library in order to implement a generator capable of producing a synthetic random constrained movie. With such a movie generator one is capable of generating good random constrained movies, increasing coverage and simulating all specified functionalities. A case study for an MPEG-4 decoder design has been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.