Rabbit: An Efficient Verification Platform Base on Virtual Peripherals

With the increasing complexity of digital circuit designs, functional verification has assumed a crucial role within the overall design flow. The current hardware design verification flow commonly entails either manually writing a testbench or downloading the design to an FPGA for verification. However, the former often results in errors in hardware operation due to inadequate stimulus, while the latter necessitates substantial physical peripheral support, making it impractical to integrate all the required peripherals on a single board. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel open-source verification platform called Rabbit, which facilitates interactive verification by reading signals from the FPGA board to the PC and sending signals from the PC to the FPGA. The proposed approach is user-friendly, effective, and rapid, thereby ensuring thorough verification. Rabbit supports user-added components to provide high flexibility and a high operating frequency, 50 kHz, which is up to approximately 11.7 times faster than the current commercial tool based on the same hardware board.