Expert Advice: How to ensure quality verification IP

Companies turning to design reuse and intellectual-property blocks need to make sure that third-party IP fits easily into the target SOC environment.

By Kenneth Larsen, VSI Alliance -- Electronic Business, 7/9/2007

Consumer applications are creating an insatiable demand for complex system-on-a-chip devices that require specialized functionality. As a result, chip complexity is rising at a faster rate than engineering productivity. It is no longer cost-effective or efficient to develop SOC designs from the ground up, so companies have turned to design reuse and intellectual-property blocks.

For this third-party IP to be truly viable, it must easily fit into the target SOC environment. This requires standard interfaces, comprehensive documentation, and an IP verification environment that monitors and tests IP functionality. According to a recent industry study, the cost of integrating IP is three times the cost of the actual IP, which indicates the seriousness of the verification challenge. Furthermore, the complexity of verification IP (VIP) is many times greater than that of the IP itself.

Unfortunately, the quality and reliability of different VIP sources vary greatly and, until recently, there was no way to assess and compare VIP from different vendors. Indeed, IP vendors themselves didn't have a formalized process for judging the suitability of their own VIP, such as how well their IP meets the needs of their customers in terms of ease of use, functionality, performance, and so on.

What VIP integrators as well as vendors needed was a consistent standardization mechanism to evaluate and communicate the suitability and quality of VIP. With this information, VIP implementers could trust that their investment in IP would be rewarded, the risk of implementation minimized, and their design and verification productivity increased.

With this critical need in mind, several leading companies banded together to focus on VIP quality measures. The VSI Alliance (VSIA) is a collective of industry-leading IP developers, EDA vendors, and IP users, including Cadence, Denali, EDA Centrum, Freescale, LSI, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, and UMC. The goal of the VSIA Verification IP Quality initiative is to provide a tool that helps VIP integrators assess whether third-party VIP is of the quality they expect while enabling VIP developers to better understand what is required to provide that quality.

In 2006 the VIP group's efforts resulted in an objective, complete, and fully quantifiable extension to the VSIA Quality IP (QIP) Metric based on four key factors: authoring and documentation, maturity and life cycle of the VIP, verification data, and the capabilities of the IP vendor. The QIP Metric provides a multidimensional criterion to help users successfully integrate, verify, use, and reuse specific IP, and it also acts as a platform for evaluating IP across many disciplines, including vendor assessment, soft IP, hard IP, and now verification IP.

Standard VIP components—developed, selected, and improved through a standardized mechanism—provide more and better VIP choices. With the latest release this spring, we have extended the VSI-QIP to include a quality assessment tool for standard VIP components, increasing its ability to help VIP vendors and integrators alike minimize risk, increase productivity, and improve their ROI.

Through the QIP Metric, VIP users can aggressively reduce the time required to make a build-versus-purchase decision. The metric enables VIP users to rank and measure multiple IP vendors against a standard metric and also compare individual VIP components with each other. Besides setting up the basis for measuring a core's characteristics against an industry-approved list of attributes, the metric provides a view of the IP vendor's general approach to IP development and processes.

The VIP vendor and consumer communicate, based on an objective foundation, opening a channel where customers can provide ongoing feedback about the VIP they've purchased. VIP vendors gain a way to analyze their own process in terms of delivering IP quality. This results in a better product from the customer's point of view, which should make for a buoyant bottom line for IP vendors.

Kenneth Larsen is the Verification IP Quality Chairperson for the VSI Alliance.