Chiplets are emerging as a new way of building IC systems via heterogeneous integration, and Universal Chip Interconnect Express (UCIe) is one of the standards defining the interconnects among chiplets. This webinar presents the SystemVerilog models of a Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) interface, including both the analog circuits in the electrical layer and digital FSMs in the logical layer. The whole physical layer (PHY) model can be efficiently simulated in SystemVerilog, using Scientific Analog’s XMODEL.

This webinar is organized in two parts. The first part gives a brief overview of the UCIe standard and explains why XMODEL is the best way to model and verify UCIe PHY, especially considering the close interactions between its electrical layer and logical layer. It will show how to model various analog circuits in the electrical layer, including the phase-locked loop (PLL), delay-locked loop (DLL), duty-cycle corrector, phase interpolator, and transmitter/receiver circuits. Each circuit block is modeled using XMODEL primitives, which enable fast and accurate simulation of their analog behaviors in SystemVerilog.

The second part shows how you can design the finite-state machines (FSMs) in the logical layer, performing digital training and calibrations on the reference voltage levels, clock-to-data timing, lane-to-lane skews, and link data rate via a series of data transmission tests with pseudo-random bit sequences. All the FSMs are described in SystemVerilog, and with XMODEL, you can simulate this logical layer model interacting with the electrical layer model entirely in SystemVerilog. It implies that you can also use various features of SystemVerilog to check the thoroughness of your simulation, such as checking the FSM state coverage.

This webinar will be beneficial to everyone who is interested in the design and verification of UCIe PHY. For analog circuit designers, the presented models will help understand the requirements posed on each circuit block, such as the scaling of bandwidth to support a wide range of data rates from 4GT/s to 32GT/s. For digital verification engineers, the presented testbenches will show how to perform SystemVerilog-based verification on the systems containing analog circuits. And most importantly, by running the simulations with the provided models, you can gain a hands-on understanding on how the various components of a UCIe PHY work to realize a high-bandwidth interconnect between chiplets.