Functional verification consumes a significant portion of the time and resources devoted to the typical
design project. As chips continue to grow in size and complexity, designers must increasingly rely on a
dedicated verification team to ensure that systems fully meet their specifications.
Verification engineers have at their disposal a set of dedicated tools and methodologies for verification
automation and quality improvement. In spite of this, functional logic errors remain a significant cause of
project delays and re‐spins. A key reason is that two important aspects of verification environment quality
– the ability to propagate the effect of a bug to an observable point and the ability to observe the faulty
effect and thus detect the bug – cannot be analyzed or measured. Existing methods, such as functional
coverage and code coverage, largely ignore these two aspects, allowing functional errors to escape the
verification process despite excellent coverage scores. Existing tools are simply unable to assess the
overall quality of simulation‐based functional verification environments.
The Certitude Functional Qualification System from SpringSoft incorporates unique technology that
measures and drives improvement of all aspects of functional verification quality for simulation‐based
environments. This paper describes the fundamental aspects of functional verification that remain
invisible to existing verification tools. It then introduces the origins and main concepts of a technology
that allows this gap to be closed: Mutation‐based testing. It describes how SpringSoft uses this technology
to deliver Certitude, the industry’s first functional qualification solution. Finally, it describes how
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