Qualitest Helps Leading Chip Manufacturer Increase Quality of SoC (System on Chip) Verification

project highlights

01 — Challenge

The client faced significant challenges due to the high complexity of the Design, the intricate verification environment, and the overwhelming volume of verification work tight schedule.

02 — Solution

Qualitest stepped in to provide broader coverage, increase the number of tests, expose bugs, and enhance the verification environment’s capabilities—delivering greater assurance and confidence.

03 — Results

Lesser bugs and possible defects in the end product, increased portability, and higher functional coverage.

Client Overview

A leading chip manufacturer is the world’s largest semiconductor company by revenue, developing x86 microprocessors used in most PCs. It supplies processors to major computer manufacturers, along with motherboard chipsets, NICs, flash memory, graphics chips, and embedded processors.

Co-designed with a leading technology company, its IPU 200G SoC leverages insights from multiple FPGA Smart NIC generations to enhance performance, security, and workload isolation, helping cloud and communication service providers optimize CPU efficiency.

Business Goals and Objectives

The leading chip manufacturer faced challenges in verifying the complex design of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), a critical component of its product. Ensuring thorough verification required a highly intricate environment with thousands of System Verilog files, leading to missed deadlines and prolonged chip tape-out.

Delays impacted time-to-market, further pressured by a key technology partner’s involvement due to its proprietary IP within the subsystem. Additionally, frequent internal employee migration disrupted schedules, requiring new joiners to ramp up quickly with minimal support.

With low reliance on previous projects due to new feature integration, extensive new testing was needed at multiple abstraction levels. To enhance verification quality and efficiency, the company approached Qualitest for experienced verification engineers.

The Qualitest Solution

Qualitest delivered a high-impact verification service with rapid turnaround, ensuring quick understanding of the client’s environment and early identification of critical gaps by.:

Learning the client’s tools and understanding the RDMA design.
Exploring the complex verification environment with minimal documentation.
Identifying gaps and bugs in the verification setup early on.

Key Contributions and Benefits

Enhanced the verification environment by introducing parallelism, enabling new test scenarios that were previously impossible.
Debugged and improved test coverage, leading to detection of at least 3 bugs in the RDMA design, identification of 1 critical bug in the technology partner’s IP and uncovering 9 firmware bugs and over 11 environmental bugs.
Expanded test coverage with at least 40 new tests and 4 cover groups, later added to the chip manufacturer’s regression list.
Achieved all client goals on time, enhancing confidence from both the client and its technology partner.
Improved overall product quality by identifying and fixing critical bugs early, preventing costly late-stage changes.
Reduced project delays by addressing gaps and inefficiencies in the verification environment.
Strengthened client reputation by avoiding potential re-spins and delivery setbacks.
Enhanced efficiency through optimized verification processes, enabling faster debugging and increased test coverage.
Through a collaborative approach, Qualitest worked closely with the client to prioritize and fix issues, significantly improving verification quality and efficiency.