Productivity Keeping Pace With Complexity
By: Brian Bailey
Without productivity gains, design size and complexity would face huge headwinds. Those gains come from a diverse set of improvements.
Sometimes doing things smarter is better than doing them faster. “The continuous adoption and advancements of formal verification techniques and solutions are delivering significant productivity gains,” says Sergio Marchese, technical marketing manager for Onespin Solutions. “It is not only about achieving sign-off on schedule, but also reducing the extra effort to deal with post RTL freeze or post-silicon bug analysis and fixing. These advancements have enabled constant-size teams to maintain the level of verification quality despite an increase in the complexity of the IP and SoCs they need to verify.”
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Through a combination of design practices, verification methodologies, improved tools, and tightening or creating feedback loops within the flows, productivity is keeping up with design size – even for many of the largest chips. Those increases in productivity enable the next increase in complexity. They have to go hand in hand. Otherwise, the process would stall. Designs on older technologies often reap the rewards.
