February 25, 2010 -- This article discusses the functional verification of IP cores and problems which arise during their implemenation in today's advanced applications. First, the usual approach to functional verification is presented together with its common difficulties. The next part features an example of hardware verification environment which was used for verification of the Evatronix JPEG 2000 encoder multimedia IP core in order to illustrate this paper's thesis. After a short description of the JPEG 2000 image compression algorithm, the structure of the environment is presented. Then the manner of test cases preparation is described as well as criteria used to determine whether a particular test is passed or failed. Finally, numerical results of hardware verification experiment are presented with some comments which conclude the article.

By Marcin Rodzik and Adam Bitniok. (Rodzik and Bitniok are with Evatronix SA.)