System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is a trend to achieve high performance, low cost, and low power in modern electronic devices. As the demand of functionality and performance increase, more IPs (Intellectual Property) are integrated into a modern SoC. Developing such a complex SoC is challenging since the SoC has limited observability; modern SoCs usually leave limited spared I/O pins for debugging purpose due to cost consideration, making it hard to analyze the internal activities via the limited I/O pins. This hampers the SoC development. To ease the difficulty, we have implemented the SYS-SIP (National Sun Yat-Sen university's SoC Infrastructure IP's) to enable the SoC development in terms of verification, debugging, monitor ing, and performance tuning. The SYS-SIP consists of five members: Processor External Interrupt Verification Module (PEVM), ICE, processor tracer, bus tracer, and protocol checker. Each of them serves specific purposes in verification, debugging, monitoring, and performance tuning. The SYS-SIP can be applied at diffierent design stages: RTL, FPGA, and chip level. The results show that SYS-SIP eases the SoC development and shortens the time-to-market significantly.

For improving the performance and application of microprocessor, it is necessary to integrate pipelined core, exception control unit, cache unit and memory management unit (MMU). The operating system is an effective way for microprocessor integration verification. However, it is not a feasible debugging methodology to detect the exact design bug while operating system booting crash. We found the main execution features of operating system are the data transfer and exception handling. We propose an integration verification methodology based on these execution features. The methodology is to verify concurrent cache transfer operation, consecutive cache transfer operation, external interrupt exception handling, page fault exception handling and multiple interrupt exception handling for microprocessor integration. We utilize ARM7-Like developed by our laboratory to do the experiment. It is effective to detect the design bugs in RTL simulation by the software-based verification methodology proposed by us. The modified ARM7-Like microprocessor is able to successfully boot Linux kernel and execute user applications in FPGA.