Towards a unified framework for pre-silicon validation

Abstract

One of the major problems seen in the pre-silicon validation realm today is the lack of a unified framework for all pre-silicon validation efforts including security validation. Lack of a unified framework for pre-silicon validation presents a “communication” challenge among different validation tool teams. While each team maintains and enhances a particular tool depending on the project they support and while these projects shift geographies to keep up with the product development life cycle, keeping the tools up to date, addressing specific tool changes and communicating the tool changes among project teams and dependent tool teams is emaciating. With this perspective, this paper seeks to highlight this issue and present a high-level solution space to address this problem. Further, the paper highlights outstanding issues that need to be resolved to enable such a unified pre-silicon validation framework to be successful.