Why HBM Controllers Pass Verification — Yet Fail in Silicon
HBM controllers often pass every verification test — protocol, timing, and corner cases — yet still fail in real silicon.
This isn’t a tooling failure.
It’s a verification mindset gap.
Passing Tests Isn’t the Same as Surviving Reality
Most HBM verification focuses on functional correctness:
Legal command sequences
Timing compliance
Clean state-machine behavior
But silicon failures don’t come from illegal behavior.
They come from legal behaviors colliding under system stress.
What Simulations Commonly Miss
In real systems, HBM operates under constant pressure:
Refresh overlapping with heavy traffic
Bank conflicts across multiple requesters
Backpressure from interconnects
Long-running contention and arbitration stress
Each condition is legal on its own — together, they create deadlocks, starvation, or bandwidth collapse that simulations rarely expose.
The Real Verification Question
The real question isn’t:
“Does this controller pass tests?”
It’s:
“Can it make forward progress forever under stress?”
Verification must shift from correctness-only to resilience-focused testing.
Read the Full Analysis
This post summarizes why the problem exists.
The full article dives deeper into real silicon behavior and verification blind spots:
👉 Full article on WIOWIZ
🔗 https://www.wiowiz.com/hbm-verification-why-controllers-pass-tests-still-fail-in-silicon.html
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