Taking Co-Verification to the Limit

When one thinks of co-verification, the image is of a team designing a system testing out its software on a virtual prototype of their hardware. So at first glance, a world-class designer of microprocessor cores like ARM would not seem a likely candidate for co-verification. But ARM thought differently. They saw the tremendous potential for co-verification in their design process and decided to use that in their latest processor design. Instead of verifying custom software, ARM wanted to use co-verification to validate a new embedded core's ability to support Microsoft's Windows CE operating system before actually fabricating the core. This effort would take co-verification as far up the design cycle as possible, making this a highly interesting and challenging situation for all involved-ARM, Microsoft and Mentor Graphics (the EDA supplier of choice for the co-verification environment.)