Automating Hardware Verification with Agentic Workflows
Hardware verification remains a significant bottleneck in chip design, often consuming up to 70% of the total development cycle. GoGoTB addresses this by introducing an agentic framework designed to automate Register Transfer Level (RTL) verification. Unlike traditional methods that rely heavily on manual testbench creation and coverage analysis, GoGoTB leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to bridge the gap between high-level design specifications and low-level verification code.
Specification-Grounded Coverage Closure
The core innovation of GoGoTB is its "specification-grounded" approach. Instead of generating tests in a vacuum, the agent uses the design specification as a source of truth to guide the generation of constrained-random testbenches. The framework operates in a closed-loop system:
- Specification Analysis: The agent parses the RTL design and its associated documentation to identify functional requirements.
- Test Generation: It generates directed and constrained-random tests aimed at specific coverage goals.
- Coverage Feedback Loop: The system executes the generated tests, analyzes the resulting coverage metrics, and uses these results as feedback to iteratively refine the testbench.
This iterative process continues until the agent achieves "coverage closure," ensuring that all functional requirements defined in the specification are verified. By grounding the agent in the specification, the framework reduces the likelihood of hallucinated test cases and ensures that verification efforts are focused on critical design features rather than arbitrary code paths.