November 5, 2007 -- Corporate efficiency consultants love to talk about "the dead moose on the table" — the important topic that everyone knows about but no one wants to bring up. In system-on-chip (SOC) verification, there is just such a dead moose: logic designer involvement in verification. All the clichs about designers not wanting to do verification and verification engineers not trusting them to verify don't matter anymore. While a dedicated verification team is essential at the cluster (multi-block) and chip levels, effective, efficient verification of large, complex chips must also involve the designers.

The most compelling reason for this is simply that bugs must be found as early in the development process as possible, when diagnosing and fixing them is fast and inexpensive. Recognizing this, many projects are placing quality requirements on the designers mandating that fewer bugs escape to be found by the verification team. Bugs resolved at the block level involve only the logic designer, minimizing engineering resources and preventing iterations through multiple team members.

In contrast, feeding a bug found in cluster-level simulation back to designers for debug and resolution can take days, stretching into weeks for problems found in chip-level or system-level simulation, acceleration, and emulation. Inevitably, this process takes a lot of time for the designers as well as the verification engineers. Chip-level and system-level verification should be used to find high-level issues, especially those related to hardware-software interaction, not basic RTL bugs.

By Thomas L. Anderson. (Anderson is a Product Marketing Director at Cadence. Design Systems, Inc.)