SoCs Verification Management, Traceability and Managing Risks in Semiconductor World

With the increased complexity in SoC design and bigger teams, manually updating the specifications across all tools is very tedious. The biggest challenge is the lack of collaboration between the systems and teams. Traceability is another important aspect for safety-critical sectors such as aero, defense, automotive etc. Engineers’ concerns include what will happen to the project traceability, particularly for a multi-site project? Will there be transparency in all teams to view the latest updated requirements?  Verification engineers in pre-silicon functional validation require high traceability and cross-functional data updates for accurate and faster verification closure. Similarly, product managers need clear visibility in the verification of goals and verification results, implementation of requirements and change requests to make informed decisions. Integration tools enable verification management in the semiconductor world and help to accelerate time to market without compromising product quality.  

To meet these requirements, companies are motivated for faster, flexible, and customer-centric approaches for application delivery. In this post, Nili Segal from Cadence, and Aparna Garg from OpsHub Inc. highlight how automated integration of Cadence vManager with requirements management and other ALM tools enables complete transparency across the ecosystem. It ensures richer traceability, enhanced collaboration, better compliance, and faster release cycles in real-time as discussed in the webinar. 

Risks and Challenges in the Semiconductor Domain 

Risks in semiconductors and hardware ecosystem in day-to-day work may include: 

• Compliance risks related to tracing of verification requirements from planning to execution. 
• Quality risks, related to the response with regard to changes, which may involve how to make an effective review/audit all requirements and how to manage dependencies between requirements and control them to be consistent 
• Schedule risks, involving how to reach the final delivery coordinated with the business plan, on time without missing or slipping the schedule 

Siloed tools and manual collaboration result in poor traceability and suffer from issues like compromised quality. They are error-prone, time-consuming, risky, cumbersome, and non-scalable, so they result in information gaps and slow down the decision-making process. 

Effective Risk Management 

To capture the major market share, there should be faster innovations, transparency, and collaboration across teams/tools. Also, a data-driven approach and traceability help in taking correct decisions and faster delivery. If we manage the scope and life cycle of requirements in an efficient way, we can identify the risks before they become critical. For aero and defense, automotive traceability is important, and we want to identify risks and mitigate them with the options below. 

• Traceability to provide priorities for the business goal, fast validation for management, and requirement changes 
• Transparency to identify critical dependencies between requirements and improved requirement visibility across the tools and across the teams 
• Rich collaboration and full transparency amongst the teams and tools 

How an Effective Integration Ecosystem Can Reduce and Manage the Risk 

Product owners and verification engineers need an automated, accurate and real-time method of syncing data across tools. Customers these days demand exceptional quality and ideal service without any system downtime, which can be achieved by the Integration of systems. Integration improves collaboration and productivity across the delivery chain and reduces the risks of delays and faulty deliveries. Also, it helps in improving traceability. 

A good integration solution is the backbone of a highly productive and collaborative ecosystem. An efficient integration ecosystem should have: 

• Full transparency between the existing tools 
• Accurate traceability 

• Seamless collaboration across the toolchain 

Will it be helpful if vManager users end up working with stale requirements or requirement teams are often looking at old test results? No! It will be an overhead for both teams to validate separately. 

Reliability, scalability, and observability are the three key aspects of effective integration and good synchronization. OpsHub ensures there is no data leakage and guarantees eventual consistency when migrating vManager with any other system of support. OpsHub integration exposes APIs to configure and monitor integrations at scale which makes it possible to automate various aspects of integration. 

vManager can be integrated with 50+ industry-leading tools such as IBM Doors, Atlassian JIRA, Azure DevOps, Jama Software, etc. vManager includes a verification plan (vPlan) to improve verification quality by creating an accurate plan that allows rollup of coverage results automatically. vPlan capabilities include: 

• Traceability from verification definition to execution 

• Ability to capture results from multiple verification engines 
• Support of PDF specification annotation from cross-functional teams. 
• Connection of all verification artifacts in one spot, collecting coverage from all the tools in one place, and showing them all together 

Integration Use Case 

Here, OpsHub Integration Manager is used for integrating Cadence vManager with IBM DOORS NG and Jira. Further, it ensures: 

• The transparency and collaboration in the ecosystem enable each team to independently make decisions based on all available data with full context. 
• All the entities and details associated with the ‘requirement’ synchronization back to manageable. 
• Teams using these tools will have a single source of truth. 

Conclusion  

The integration of vManager with IBM DOORS NG and Jira helps and enhances productivity as it provides: 

• Verification with enhanced traceability and planning 
• Real-time visibility for all the changes and updates and actual development of each entity 
• Improved productivity due to real-time exchange of information between the two teams 
• Increased collaboration between product management/requirements teams and verification teams to prevent compliance issues, delivery delays and financial loss 
• Real-time exchange of information (for example, status updates for parts, requirements, and engineering change requests (ECRs)) between product management and back-end team 

• One source of truth for every part and story 

Overall, it reduces the risk, improves productivity, and helps accelerate innovation to remain ahead of the competition. 

Learn More 

• vManager Verification Management 
• A Program Manager’s Guide to Successful Integrated Circuit Verification (Cadence White Paper) 
• vManager Integration with IBM Doors 
• vManager Integration with Jira