Questa Verification IQ

Overview

Questa Verification IQ employs predictive and prescriptive verification analytics to accelerate closure, accelerate debug turnaround time, and provide regression efficiency.

Questa Verification IQ Challenges and Goals

Collaborative data driven verification powered by analytics

Questa VIQ is the collaborative, data-driven verification solution that transforms the verification process using analytics, collaboration, and traceability, supporting verification management, debug, and coverage.

Introducing Questa VIQ

The growing complexity in the design and verification of ICs amplifies the challenges of getting to market on time with first-time success. Those challenges
associated with turnaround times and verification closure require greater efficiency and acceleration of all verification tasks, which can be achieved only by
becoming data driven. Preserving historical design and verification data allows experienced engineers to make judgements, but with modern high-performance computing and mass storage this data can be augmented with predictive and prescriptive analytics. This is known as big data.

Big data is transforming all industries, enabling them to innovate their products more rapidly and improve many aspects of our lives. EDA is powering these
transformations. Verification needs to transform in step, so we can predict which test to run next, the root cause of a failure, and what stimulus is required.

The Questa Verification IQ solution is made up of 4 applications and implemented in a web-based framework providing scalable verification management.

Questa Verification IQ (VIQ)

Testplan Author

Testplan Author is our plan and requirements driven front-end, providing a collaborative testplan editor to capture the testplan that drives the verification process. Testplan Author is integrated tightly with the other Questa Verification IQ applications and supports coverage from multiple engines. It employs the power of lifecycle management through integration with ALM tools, such as Siemens Polarion.

Using Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC), Testplan Author allows data to be both managed within each domain and dynamically available to each domain. It maintains a tight digital thread using requirements tools, like Polarion, and by providing complete traceability — from requirements to implementation and verification results — for safety compliance. OSLC provides the ability to have an agnostic solution to support other tools like Siemens Teamcenter and IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next.

Regression Navigator

Regression Navigator is the collaborative front-end to our regression engine, providing visibility and controllability of regressions in a device and OS independent interface. Integrated tightly with Questa Verification Run Manager (VRM), it enables collaborative launching of regressions and the ability to analyse results across multiple regressions, from multiple users, across multiple projects.

Regression Navigator’s power is not only due to the collaborative running of regressions but also in regression analysis. With all results stored in a single place, it is possible to gain insights into results across the history of a test. This allows analytics to be applied to data to provide information that would be hard to correlate any other way. Automated bucketing of failures is achieved by analysing the results of each test in the regression and applying ML to improve debug turnaround time.

Coverage Analyzer

Coverage Analyzer accelerates coverage closure by applying analytics to the coverage closure problem. By providing team based collaborative closure and sharing URLs, collaborative exclusions, and many more team-based features, it improves the understanding of the coverage model, supporting code coverage, functional coverage, and testplan coverage.

Coverage Analyzer applies analytics to visualizations, giving insights into coverage in different dimensions, using heat maps, distribution graphs, network graphs, expression trees, and much more. Customers claim 3–5X faster closure with Coverage Analyzer compared to structural-based coverage analysis tools.

Verification Insight

Verification Insight provides the ability to build project metric dashboards. A major benefit is its ability to capture verification data that would traditionally be lost in most user environments. These metrics can be viewed in various dashboards made up of customizable widgets. Although Verification Insight is tightly integrated with the other Questa Verification IQ applications, it can be used as a standalone tool. Verification Insight concentrates on providing visualizations and insights into what happened, and why, utilizing trending data, gauges, and cross analytics.

Verification Insight stores data throughout the verification process and across multiple projects, with features for historical data management. This allows ML based predictive and prescriptive analytics to be applied to accelerate and improve the verification process.

Key Benefits

  • Faster turnaround times: Accelerate root cause exploration, Automated debug preparation, Collaboration data management
  • Accelerated verification closure: Find coverage holes quicker, Collaboration analysis, Analytical navigation
  • Resource management: ML assisted test selection, Automated results-based actions, Compute efficiency
  • Functional safety compliance: Integration with lifecycle management, Requirement traceability to verification and implementation
  • Project visibility: Collaboration data availability, Actionable data, Project progress management
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Simulation and Debug

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HLS & Verification

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Debug Environment

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Static RTL Verification

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Hardware-Assisted Verification

The Veloce proFPGA system architecture offers best-in-class modularity, scalability, flexibility and portability to serve the verification requirements of today’s hardware and software engineers.

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