The credibility of a design release is measured by pass rate of the tests run on it in the form of regressions. These tests include both directed and random (e.g. Braker and Sting). Another indicator for the clean design is its coverage numbers. The goal of the triage team is to run these simulations periodically and keep an eye on these two factors. If a test fails or coverage drops (which is a common thing when people are working on a rapidly growing design), we root cause the issue and fix it or let the relevant person know about the error. Writing new tests to verify a new feature also lies in our expertise.
Customer Request
Triage team worked with a world leading fabless semiconductor company based on RISC-V architecture. They requested us to assist in catching and fixing bugs in a timely manner so that they may not affect/break any further in the release. Also they wanted us to improve their triage infrastructure.
Our Approach
To debug and fix the failing tests, a strong understanding of C and assembly language concepts are required along with the strong understanding of the architecture of the DUT. We have a rightly qualified team to drive this project.
The project consisted of four major goals. Triage infrastructure improvement, pass rate to 99%, test environments improvement, and XPROP verification. The uniqueness of these goals were their distinctions – independence of each other.
We revamped the triage script (which was responsible for catching test failures and put them in a nice tabular form). We developed a software solution to test the functionality of the script to make sure that when someone makes an update to the script the original functionality is not altered.
Our major responsibilities were to run simulations, catch failures, and debug/fix them thus we accomplished them improving the pass percentage of the subsequent simulations and keeping the project healthy. We efficiently kept it above 99%.
We also done the verification of the XPROP (x propagation) related issues and enhanced the pass percentage of XPROP simulations from ~80% to 100% well before the deadline.
