The design and verification of the AlphaStation 600 5-series workstation

The AlphaStation 600 5-series workstation is a high-performance, uniprocessor design based on the Alpha 21164 microprocessor and on the PCI bus. Six CMOS ASICs provide high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects between the CPU, the main memory, and the I/O subsystem. The verification effort used directed, pseudorandom testing on a VERILOG software model. A hardware-based verification technique provided a test throughput that resulted in a significant improvement over software tests. This technique currently involves the use of graphics cards to emulate generic DMA devices. A PCI hardware demon is under development to further enhance the capability of the hardware-based verification.