Last month, Richard Goering wrote an excellent blog post on “Best Practices for Selecting and Using Verification IP (VIP).” In this blog post, Richard listed ten questions you should make sure you can answer when selecting commercial VIP. The ten questions came from Pete Heller, senior product line manager for VIP at Cadence, and they are:
- Does the vendor offer verification IP and memory models for all of the protocols you need, when you need them?
- How mature is the VIP you’re considering? How many designs has it verified?
- How easy is it to configure the VIP?
- Is there a compliance test suite available “out of the box”?
- Does the VIP support all simulators, languages and methodologies?
- What are your verification needs? Do you need the VIP for simulation only, or do you also want to run it on an accelerator or use it for formal block-level verification?
- What metrics are you going to use to determine when verification is completed, and will the VIP measure and report those metrics for you?
- Is the vendor aware of, and actively participating in, the development of the protocol standard or new versions thereof?
- If you use an ARM protocol, does the vendor have a close working relationship with ARM?
- How is the VIP verified? (At Cadence, this is done with design IP, assertions, and regression testing, in close partnership with protocol standards bodies or with providers such as ARM).
Be sure to read Richard’s full post for help with answering those questions.
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