In this 3-part blog, I’ve been examining the emerging role of the Formal Verification (FV) Program Leader, an individual who plays a critical part in adoption of FV as part of an organization’s verification strategy, and its deployment on real projects. The FV Program Leader’s importance and value stems not from him or her being an expert in FV technology, techniques or tools, nor from being the direct manager of the FV engineers in the organization, although he or she may also be one or both of these things in addition to being the FV Program Leader. Rather, it comes from the FV Program Leader being an advocate, evangelist, facilitator and coordinator for the organization’s efforts to understand, adopt and utilize formal verification.
In part one of this discussion, I listed the six primary aspects of the FV Program Leader’s role: Organization, Training and Upskilling, Test Planning, Progress Metrics, Sign-off Process, and Post Mortem Analysis. In parts one and two, I talked in detail about the first four of these roles. In this, the third and final installment, I’ll discuss the last two: achieving final sign-off via formal verification and learning from the experience via post-mortem analysis.
Sign-off Process: Sign-off flows are, of course, very familiar to design and verification teams, who are accustomed to using them to sign-off various aspects of a design, such as timing via static timing analysis, functionality via simulation, netlists via RTL-to-gate equivalence checking, and final tape-out databases via LVS and DRC checking. Sign-off typically involves a checklist of gating criteria that must be reviewed and approved by a committee of stakeholders in the process. The sign-off process helps to determine when a given stage of the design flow is complete and enforces a minimum standard of quality control.
