About This Session
Verifying USB Host designs-under-test (DUTs) is increasingly difficult as the USB ecosystem continues to expand across device types, protocol modes, and class behaviors. Traditional verification approaches depend on synthetic device models and manually developed testbenches, which are expensive to build, difficult to maintain, and often unable to capture the nuanced behavior of real hardware.
This work presents a production-proven verification methodology that brings physical USB devices directly into simulation and emulation environments, replacing conventional behavioral device models with real hardware. The framework integrates the Linux USB subsystem and the libusb library to create a user-space virtual adapter that connects physical USB devices to SystemVerilog DPI-based device BFMs. Through this architecture, a USB Host DUT can enumerate and communicate with real USB devices using protocol-accurate control, bulk, and interrupt transactions while maintaining standards compliance and timing fidelity.
Case studies using USB mass-storage devices across High-Speed, SuperSpeed, and SuperSpeed+ modes show significant reductions in testbench development effort, improved behavioral coverage, and better exposure to real-world timing and interoperability conditions that are difficult to reproduce with model-based approaches. The framework also enables the same verification architecture to be reused across both simulation and emulation platforms without modification.
By incorporating real devices into the verification loop, this methodology offers a scalable and realistic path for USB Host validation. It also lays the groundwork for extending real-device-based verification to additional USB classes and other high-speed interfaces where accurate device behavior is essential.