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Part 3: The 2020 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study

This blog is a continuation of a series of blogs related to the 2020 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study.  In my previous blog, I presented the findings from our new study related to how successful FPGA projects are in terms of verification effectiveness. In this blog I focus on FPGA verification effort trends.

FPGA Verification Effort Trends

Directly asking study participants how much effort they spend in verification will not work. The reason is that it’s hard to find a paper or article on verification that doesn’t start with the phrase: “Seventy percent of a project’s effort is spent in verification…” In other words, the industry is already biased to respond with this effort value. Yet, there are really no creditable references to quantify this value.

I don’t believe that there is a simple answer to the question, “How much effort was spent on verification in your last project?” In fact, I believe that it is necessary to look at multiple data points derived from multiple questions to truly get a sense of effort spent in verification. And that’s what we did in our functional verification study.

Percentage of Project Time Spent in Verification

To try to assess the effort spent in verification, let’s begin by looking at one data point, which is the total project time spent in verification, as shown in Fig. 3-1. You can see two extremes in this graph. In general, projects that spend very little time in verification are typically working on designs with a good deal of existing pre-verified design IP, which is integrated to create a new product. On the other extreme, projects that spend a significant amount of time in verification often have a high percentage of newly developed design IP that must be verified.

Fig. 3-1. Percentage of FPGA project time spent in verification

Overall, we found an increase in average percentage of FPGA project time spent in verification during the period 2014 through 2020. Again, this is an indication of growing design and verification complexity.

Peak Number of Design and Verification Engineers

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges today is to control cost and engineering headcount, which means identifying FPGA design and verification solutions that increase productivity. To illustrate the need for productivity improvement, we discuss the trend in terms of increasing engineering headcount. Fig. 3-2 shows the mean peak number of FPGA engineers working on a project.

Fig. 3-2. Mean Peak Number of FPGA Engineers Working on a Project

While, on average, the demand for FPGA design engineers grew at about a 1.5 percent CAGR between 2012 and 2020, the demand for FPGA verification engineers grew at a 5.5 percent CAGR. It is worth noting that during the period 2007 through 2014, the IC/ASIC market went through similar growth demands related to verification engineers to address growing verification complexity.

In my next blog I focus on the time that FPGA design and verification engineers spend in various task.

Quick links to the 2020 Wilson Research Group Study results

Harry Foster

Harry Foster is Chief Scientist Verification for the Design Verification Technology Division of Mentor, A Siemens Business; and is the Co-Founder and Executive Editor for the Verification Academy. In addition, Harry is serving as the 2021 Design Automation Conference General Chair. He holds multiple patents in verification and has co-authored six books on verification. Harry was the 2006 recipient of the Accellera Technical Excellence Award for his contributions to developing industry standards, and was the original creator of the Accellera Open Verification Library (OVL) standard.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com/verificationhorizons/2020/11/18/part-3-the-2020-wilson-research-group-functional-verification-study/