No one is invincible!

I’ve got great news.  We’ve gotten approval for $100,000 to grow the cpu farm and buy more simulation licenses.  I think that we should be able to pull the schedule in by at least a month with this.

- Boss

We’ve all been in a similar discussion.  Management is looking for any way to increase productivity.  Random testing seems to create higher confidence with more instances of the same test .  The problem is, sometimes growing the number of simulations by 10x grows the debug effort too.

This particular case aside, each generation of ASIC requires more and more verification.  Each project therefore needs to run more simulations per day than the project before.  So, how can we scale up CPU usage year after year?  In short, the answer is organization.

Several companies in the Boston area employ SQL-based regression management tools to filter, sort, and organize testing lists and results.  The effect is CPU farms with hundreds or even thousands of CPUs running simulations.  A relatively small team can efficiently utilize these CPUs without wasting too many cycles on repeat errors or useless re-runs.

When tests fail, not all of them need to be debugged.  Some failures are debugged, others are stored in the database for re-run following the fix of bugs that are already filed.  One project that we know of required that every failing test and seed be re-run wihout failure as a pre-condition for tape-out.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Verification. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.