PraveenKumar Vagala Edited

Praveen Kumar Vagala

Design Verification Engineer,
Independent Researcher

About the Speaker

Praveen Kumar Vagala is an independent researcher and design verification professional in the semiconductor industry, with over 16 years of experience across GPU, SoC, FPGA, and complex reusable IP verification. His professional work includes architecting advanced verification methodologies, reusable testbench environments, coverage-closure, formal verification flows, AMS, and AI/LLM-assisted automation frameworks for complex hardware systems. Alongside his semiconductor engineering career, he contributes to the broader research and technology community as a technical author and scholarly peer reviewer, evaluating technical manuscripts and research contributions in his field. His research focuses on design verification automation, embedded systems, coverage closure, AI-assisted verification methodologies, and scalable verification infrastructure for modern chip-development programs.

A Reusable Three-Layer Configuration Framework for FSDB-to-Module-Level Stimulus Replay

Overview

Verification teams often need to reproduce chip- or subsystem-level simulation failures at the IP level, where debugging is faster. Manual waveform extraction and stimulus formatting are slow, error-prone, and repeated for each IP. This talk presents CDSR (Configuration-Driven Stimulus Reconstruction), which separates signal probing, protocol-semantic reconstruction, and replay-target mapping into declarative YAML layers interpreted by a single reusable engine. CDSR reconstructs stimulus once for replay in compatible testbenches. Validation across OpenTitan AES and OTBN and OpenHW CV32E40P, spanning two protocol families, completed in under 35 seconds and achieved 100% byte-exact fidelity against the original binaries

Key Points

  • CDSR automates the reconstruction of chip- or subsystem-level waveform stimulus for faster, less error-prone IP-level failure reproduction.
  • Three declarative YAML layers separate signal probing, protocol semantics, and replay-target mapping while retaining a single reusable engine.
  • Validation across three open-source IP blocks and two protocol families achieved reconstruction in under 35 seconds with 100% byte-exact fidelity.