T&VS provides solution to Post Silicon Validation

By _Test and Verification Solutions Blog

May 19, 2016

About customer:

The customer is a leader in telecommunication products and services.

Scope of work:

Validation is a quality assurance process to establish a high degree of assurance that a product, service, or system accomplishes its intended requirements.

• The aim was to exercise the design to check that it is fit for purpose and that it meets end user requirements.
• Validation was performed on an FPGA based prototype prior to tape-out before final validation when the actual silicon became available.

T&VS Technical Solution:

T&VS developed test cases suitable for running both on the FPGA prototype and the silicon. The tests were targeted at both functional and structural verification:

• The functional test cases and test suites developed by T&VS covered every aspect of the design to check if it fit for purpose and find bugs which will report to the customer.
• In the area of structural test data, the focus was on test suites for achieving the user specified structural code coverage targets for the given embedded system C / C++ code.

T&VS also created automated scripts to run all the test cases and generate a pass/fail result.

The customer selected T&VS because of the capability to debug, root cause the problem and provide solutions at earliest.

Delivery Model:

The customer discussed the requirements and expected date of delivery with T&VS. The requirements were then captured by T&VS and agreed with the customer. T&VS agreed a project plan with the customer which included detailed explanation of the functional and code coverage targets.

The project was executed in four phases with deliverables reviewed at the end of each phase.

• The first phase covered the requirements preparation, selection of the target prototyping platform and preparation of test plan which covered both bring up and functional tests.
• The second phase began with the validation of the FPGA prototype according to the test plan. Each block in the design was tested and each test failure was root-caused to identify the bug and provide a solution.
• The third phase involved direct validation on the first silicon according to test plan. Regression validation, functional validation, and structural validation was performed in this phase. Power measurements, calibration, different voltage / current range experiments were also performed
• The fourth phase covered code optimization, code clean up and static analysis all of which was reviewed and signed off with the customer.

The T&VS offshore manager was assigned to manage the T&VS resources, allocates the work and provide regular status reports to the customer. This provided the customer with a single point of contact.

Results:

The deliverables were provided as per the projected delivery date with all of the requirements covered. 100% functional coverage was achieved. The user guide and test plan documents were shared with the customer.

Customer Benefits:

• 100% functional coverage closure within the scheduled date.
• Blended T&VS model allowed the customer to meet the strict budget guidelines.