Verification Experts Vs. Generalists

Experts At The Table: As chips and systems become more complicated, more verification tasks get abstracted. So do we need more specialists who are experts in specific tasks, or do we need more generalists who know how to use the tools but don’t necessarily have the depth of understanding? Or do we need some way to balance both? Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts, including Josh Rensch, director of application engineering at Arteris; Matt Graham, senior group director for verification software product management at Cadence; Vijay Chobisa, senior director for product management for the Veloce hardware-assisted verification platform at Siemens EDA; and Frank Schirrmeister, executive director for strategic programs for systems solutions at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. Click here for part one of this discussion.

L-R: Arteris’ Rensch; Cadence’s Graham; Siemens’ Chobisa; Synopsys’ Schirrmeister.

SE: Verification flows have evolved and grown in response to increasing complexity. What do you see as the biggest changes? 

Rensch: There are a couple of things starting to happen, including verification teams in certain companies being given the authority to tell the designers which way to go. They’re also trying to make templates to improve the verification process. They’re trying to make things that are at a unit level and can be stamped out so they can verify smaller, LEGO-like pieces. You have the LEGO block, and you say, ‘Okay, I have my two, I’ve got my four, I’ve got my six, and I’ve got my eight LEGO block button things, and I can use those to stamp out other things that are bigger.” 

SE: That sounds like a chiplet. 

Rensch: Chiplet is a loaded term. It’s like when people say AI. 

Schirrmeister: What that’s referring to is hierarchical verification. 

Rensch: Yes, block-to-top reuse. And companies are building specific teams to build specific IPs, and that’s all they do. Before I was in the EDA industry doing verification work, we had to look at the whole thing where we could, conceptually, almost keep the whole thing in our head. You can’t do that anymore, so you have ‘ block-to-top reuse.’ I’ve also heard it called hierarchical reusability. There are lots of terms for this. People build these small blocks, and they have teams that just build this one block. They say, ‘My job is to build the six-by-two LEGO block. That’s all I do, every day.’ In verification, it’s even more interesting. It used to be, ‘I know how to do stimulus. I know how to do agents. In UVM terms, I know how to do all the different pieces of the UVM bench.’ I’m now encountering people who never touched a bench or never touched stimulus, so the specialization is growing. I’m hearing from people who hire verification people, and they say it’s hard to find someone who has a broad skill base to handle problems. There’s a really good book called, ‘Range.’ It’s about how generalists will rule the world, and it’s all about how ER doctors are generalists because they see all sorts of stuff, and they can’t be specialists. We’re getting down to that in our industry, as well. We’re all getting specialized, and we’re all trying to make smaller things because we can’t conceptually hold the bigger things in our head. 

To read the full article on SemiEngineering, click here.