The manufacturing industry saw significant improvement in quality within the last few decades due to the implementation of Lean Manufacturing process and Six Sigma quality control measures.

Lean Manufacturing, also called Just-in-time (JIT), was pioneered by Toyota to reduce non value added waste in the manufacturing process through continuous improvement and producing only when needed with minimum inventory of raw materials and finished goods. Six Sigma is a well known, data driven set of standards that use in-depth statistical metrics to eliminate defects and achieve exceptional quality at all levels of the supply chain. Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma quality (Lean Six Sigma) have merged in theory and practice [1]. This new paradigm requires each employee to assume responsibility for the quality of their own work. To create higher quality, defects need to detected and fixed at the source. Quality is built and assured at each step in the process rather than through inspection at the end. Adoption of Lean Six Sigma in production resulted in the high quality of goods and services that we all enjoy today.

These same principals and philosophy can be directly integrated into the IC design industry to improve the quality of chips. Defects discovered in silicon at the end of the manufacturing process are costly, inefficient and wasteful. Instead, bugs should be detected at the RTL source where they are created. The traditional way of designers writing the HDL code, performing minimum amount of verification and throwing it over the wall to the verification team is the ultimate cause of poor quality, long project cycle and wasted money for investors and stock holders alike. It is time the IC design industry adopts the Lean Six Sigma philosophy to build quality design from the very beginning.

There are a couple of reasons that account for the divide between design and verification. First is the notion that it is better to have another pair of eyes to examine and verify the HDL design rather than trusting the designers who write the RTL. The second is the low verification ROI achieved by using the traditional simulation technique to perform block level verification. A lot of time and effort is needed to create the verification infrastructure, thus negating the productivity gains from early verification.

The first factor requires a change of attitude, as what happened in the manufacturing industry. People need to be made responsible and accountable for the quality of their own work. Detecting failures at the source cost the least amount of time, money and effort. Quality can only improve when individuals are held responsible and results are measurable.

The second factor can be eliminated with the advancement of formal verification technology. Formal verification requires no testbench, therefore reducing the requirement on building verification infrastructure; it performs exhaustive analysis and can often catch corner case bugs that are hard to find through simulation. Debugging at this stage is more efficient because of the intimate knowledge the designer has of the code, the limited scope of logic involved and the fact that formal tools show the source of the problem through error traces. Using these tools early in the design flow can detect bugs at the source and thus significantly improve the design quality.

There are two types of formal functional verification tools in the market. The first one is automatic functional verification. Automatic functional verification tools take the RTL design alone and perform exhaustive formal analysis to catch design bugs that result in symptoms such as dead code, single and pair-wise state machine deadlock etc. This significantly improves the quality of the design with zero effort, offering the best verification ROI.

Another type of formal functional verification is property verification (also called model checking). Designers write assertions in the RTL to describe the constraints of the environment and desired behavior of the block. Property verification tools perform exhaustive formal analysis to detect situations that violate the desired design behavior. It produces error traces to show the sequence of events that lead to the violations. Designers can debug and fix the errors easily because verification is performed within limited scope at the block level.

If every design team adopts these early functional verification (EFV) tools in the design stage and creates accountable measure to make designers responsible for the quality of their own code, we will see significant improvement in design quality as we have seen in the manufacturing industry. This in turn leads to reduced project cycle, saved investment and even competitive advantage in the market place. Achieving Six Sigma quality in IC design is possible with early functional verification.

[1] F. Jacobs, R. Chase, N. Aquilano, Operations & Supply Management, 12th Edition, McGraw-Hill.

Sep 17, 2010