May 29, 2007 -- While the increasing use of design intellectual property (IP) has considerably reduced design effort per gate for the chip designer, it has had an inverse effect on the chip-level integration and functional verification effort. IP verification and correct integration have become a dominant source of effort and risk in system-on-chip (SOC) projects.

In this article, we explain how we used complete formal functional verification that enables us as IP providers to certify highest IP quality, and to do so cost-effectively and with a high productivity of 2,000 to 4,000 lines of verified RTL code per engineer-month. The resulting IP quality significantly reduces the IP integrator's effort, cost and risk. Such results have the potential to fundamentally change the proliferation rate of IP and the profitability of the IP business.

By Lorenzo di Gregorio, Carlo del Giglio, and Michael Siegel. (Di Gregorio is Project Leader for the architecture definition and development of the PPv2 processors and multiprocessor clusters for Infineon Technologies. Del Giglio is a Corporate Application Engineer at OneSpin Solutions GmbH and Siegel is Product Manager at OneSpin Solutions GmbH.)