One of the major headaches when building a SoC is the quality of the adopted IP. A general SoC usually contains many IP cores which are either provided by the internal design team or purchased from 3^rd party providers. An IP block usually comes with a complete function and performance spec for SoC integrators. However, SoC integrators usually don’t provide much of an idea of how well the given IP has been verified. Primitive metrics such as code-coverage might be provided but it is definitely not sufficient. The consequence of adopting a not-well-verified IP in a SoC could be a nightmare, especially when it happens in the late integration stage. A problematic IP could be extremely hard to debug in the SoC level.

One thing we have observed in the industry is that people are looking for better signoff metrics which can provide more meaningful verification information. Traditional code-coverage provides a very straightforward number but it hardly provides much insight about the verification quality. Functional coverage, on the other hand, gives the integrator a much better idea of the stimulus statistics but doesn’t answer the question of how healthy the verification environment is. To compensate the missing part of the existing coverages, an orthogonal metric is necessary to take the verification environment into account.

In the next blog, we will introduce what that metric might look like and how the industry is adopting it. Stay tuned.