Breaking News: Verification problem “under control”!
Yep - that’s right. Gary Smith announced it this morning at DAC. Now it might come as a surprise to those of us who are working in the area of hardware verification, but apparently it’s true. It certainly came as a surprise to me, and to a friend of mine who’s the manager of a hardware team, but perhaps we just have a different interpretation of “under control”. Those of us deep in the verification trenches might say a lot of things about the state of verification today, but I’m not sure “under control” would be one of them 
In all fairness though, Gary made this claim in the context of his 5 major design issues list, where he claimed that the top issues were:
- Software
- Software
- Software
- DFM
- Power
If verification is under control, then I’d really hate to see how bad a shape these things were in! I suspect though that he means that verification at least has some languages, tools, methodologies and books. Lots of books [1]. Some of the problem areas he mentioned don’t seem to have any solutions just now, so I guess from the outside at least, it probably does look like things are under control.
Verification? Move along folks; there’s nothing to see.
David
[1] you had to be there
