Functional Qualification
by: George Bakewell, Director of Product marketing, SpringSoft
As published in the February 2010 issue of Components in Electronics
Today's complex chips are verified using sophisticated verification environments that are often more complex than the design itself. Although advancements have been made in the areas of stimulus generation and coverage measurement, existing tools still do not provide the engineer with an overall measure of "how good" the testbench is at exposing the presence of bugs. There is no way to measure how well the verification environment propogates the effects of bugs to observable points or detects incorrect operation at those points. The inability to measure these tasks in a consistent and automated way leads to significant uncertainty about the effectiveness of verification.
What is Functional Closure?
"The Verdi tool helped cut our debug time in half"
-Nguyen Le, a senior verification engineer in the XBOX Group at Microsoft
