How Mature is your Design/Verification Organization?
We had a good office discussion recently about various chip design/verification groups that my colleagues and I have been a part of over the years, and the observation that various organizations are at differing points on a maturity scale. In our Verification Academy here at Mentor Graphics, we characterize three stages of evolution of a design/verification team as learning steps, leading to capabilities and certain behaviors, and of course we link those to various aspects of verification methodology for which we provide tools and services. We called those three stages ‘crawl’, ‘walk’ and ‘run’.
It should be noted that there is nothing wrong with life in the crawling stage! Crawling is the first adventure, the first exploration, and it meets our needs at the time. But sooner or later we’re going to hit a challenge that makes us want to get to the next level, and the next. The challenges don’t go away, they just change.
I had the opportunity this year to meet with our customers in Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China, and talk about their challenges in Design Verification, and the discussion about maturity and evolution struck a chord. The same themes and challenges came up several times: meeting schedule, quality and budget goals; how to determine that verification is complete, how to manage all the data that is required for a comprehensive verification setup, and how to handle verification of increasingly complex protocols, interfaces, low power requirements.
The good news is that teams can take a step by step approach – building up different aspects of their flow and methodology, learning to walk and run in assertions, UVM, functional coverage, low power verification, step by step, rather than an all or nothing approach. We can help with that, with both great methodology advice, and great tools and verification IP. Although we work with many customers who are on the bleeding edge and have very large demanding designs, we strive also for ease of use and ease of adoption to help teams adopt advanced verification step by step.
Learn more about verification challenges and advanced verification solutions at my online seminar “Advanced Verification For All : SV/UVM, UCIS, UPF Made Easy” which is now available for offline viewing on Verification Academy. I look forward to discussing with you.
Thanks for reading,
Gordon
