February 16, 2011 -- Would you ever use a wrench to tighten a Philips screw? Or hammer a square peg into a round hole? Chip design today has become more of verification task than design. Designers spend more than 50% of their time trying to come up with ways to verify their designs or, worse yet, someone else’s design. Despite the change in the nature of the design work, designers keep using the same old design tools, hammering away trying to close the Design and Verification Gap.

Over the past decade or so, designs have transitioned from code writing to IP and code verification. Most designers today are tasked with taking a piece of IP designed by someone else who may not be even around in the company, or a design so old that the original designer does not even remember the details, or even IP your company bought from a third party and try to make it satisfy the spec. All is well until you realize that the changes you made to the code have left many holes in the functionality which are not covered by the original vectors you got with IP/ design. In turn, the changes resulted in many unintended consequences that you could not have predicted based on the IP/ design spec. The issues only magnify once you put all the IP blocks together.

Well that’s exactly what happens when you try to hammer a Philips screw into place. Step back and take a good look at the techniques you use today! Are you still using the same simulation methods? Are you still relying on LEC to catch some of the problems? Are you tossing the verification work over the wall to the verification folks and calling it the day – that’s their problem (until it comes back to you with an embarrassing bug!)?

Over the last decade design teams have added linting to their flows. EDA vendors extended linting to cover even more exotic checks. The tools helped the managers to become a design IRS and gain a little more visibility into the quality of the design. But, neither did the verification tasks get any easier, nor did the design quality improve by what was promised. Most designers used these tools only as a check list. The unintended consequence was the amount of extra work deciphering linter reports. The problem is that this activity often has low ROI because of the noise, the difficulty in setup and managing yet another set of files and results.

Even though designers are finding themselves doing more verification work than design, the tool of choice is still basically a big hammer (i.e. the simulator). Linters so far have helped managers more than the designers in the trenches.

It is perhaps time for more finesse and a bit of strategy. Next-generation tools can help designers better strategize their work, and better targeting their simulations. With targeted simulation and functionally checking the design on the fly, designers can now look deeper into design and make sure they did not overlook potential bugs.

What tools can help in this process? Is it time to re-think strategies and re-tool? Perhaps it's time to address the Design and Verification Gap. This means marrying verification and design activities together, and starting verification essentially right at the outset. Perhaps it is also time to go beyond traditional simulation, linting and traditional verification techniques.

Verification essentially needs to move hand-in-hand with the design. Early verification will not only increase productivity and ROI, but it will also focus designers to cover as many functionality scenarios as possible. Next-generation tools must also incorporate a simple setup along with super-fast analysis runtimes to incrementally check the design, help designer target simulation, debug the design on the fly, and to provide feedback on the potential holes left in the design as a result of recoding or other changes.

As your designs grow and you include more IP, your verification tasks will certainly grow. Be sure to Mind the Design and Verification Gap.

By Rick Eram.

Rick Eram is Director of Sales and Field Operations at Real Intent, Inc.