Protocol Verification Expertise

Deep, proven expertise across the full stack of industry-standard semiconductor interface protocols.

HIGH-SPEED SERIAL INTERFACES

SystemVerilog Expertise

PCIe is the dominant high-bandwidth interface for CPUs, GPUs, NVMe storage, and datacenter accelerators. SSN verification engineers have built and deployed full-featured PCIe UVM environments including:

Transaction Layer Packet (TLP) generation and checking — Memory Read/Write, IO, Configuration, and Message TLPs.

Data Link Layer — DLLP generation, ACK/NAK protocol, replay buffer management, and flow control (FC) initialization.

Physical Layer — LTSSM state machine coverage, link training sequences, equalization (Gen3+), and error recovery.

Advanced Error Reporting (AER) — injecting correctable, uncorrectable non-fatal, and uncorrectable fatal errors; validating AER registers and interrupt generation.

PCIe SR-IOV — Physical Function and Virtual Function register space coverage.

Compliance testing — protocol-level assertions aligned to PCI-SIG specification requirements.

Ethernet

Ethernet verification at SSN spans the complete protocol stack, from MAC-layer verification to high-speed PCS/PMA serdes bring-up. Key capabilities include:

GMII/RGMII/SGMII/XGMII/XLGMII interface verification.
IEEE 802.3 frame generation: variable payload sizes, VLAN tagging (802.1Q), jumbo frames, and minimum/maximum frame boundary conditions.
Flow control (PAUSE frames, PFC), error insertion (FCS errors, runt frames, giant frames), and half-duplex collision handling.
10G/25G/40G/100G/400G multi-lane aggregation (RS-FEC, CAUI, LAUI) and lane reordering verification.
TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking) — Credit-Based Shaper (CBS), Time-Aware Shaper (TAS), and 802.1AS time synchronization.

SerDes — High-Speed Serial PHY Verification

SerDes interfaces underpin every modern high-speed chip-to-chip and chip-to-module link. SSN verification engineers work at both the RTL abstraction level and the analog behavioral model level:

Analog-behavioral SerDes models with programmable pre-emphasis, equalization, and jitter injection.
CDR (Clock and Data Recovery) bring-up sequences, eye-opening measurement, and BER margin testing.
JTAG-based boundary scan and SerDes loopback mode verification.
Protocol-layer compliance verification for CPRI/eCPRI (4G/5G baseband fronthaul), JESD204B/C (ADC/DAC interfaces), and OIF-CEI variants.