What is Design Quality? How can Quality in Electronic Design be Quantified?

Abstract

Quality of an IC design can be determined by many factors like Performance, Flexibility, Reliability, Testability, Ease of Maintenance, Yield, Portability, Reusability, etc. Quality of a design has to be considered on every level of a design from RTL description down to silicon. The chip design industry has come a long way since the days when quality considerations were an ad hoc combination of collective reactions to afterthoughts and back-end control gates used as a method of screening.Today, successful design efforts are measured by how fast they can meet aggressive design schedules. A key element in achieving aggressive design schedules in a meaningful way would be to develop designs that work the first time. Quality considerations in design were first introduced as part of the structured approach to VLSI design methodology more than a decade ago. Along with it came generic recommendations, rules and mandates that equally applied to all design practices with the goal of making the design process more predictable. All of this came at a price that included power, area and performance. Because of these drawbacks, the standard products industry (none-ASIC) continued to use ad hoc design methods instead of using a more streamlined and structured approach.Technology scaling into deep sub-micron and the growing design complexity has required many aspects of design flow and design methodology to become more design specific. Once known as bullet- proof methods in design have given way to more flexible implementation choices based on performance optimization goals and other necessary design tradeoffs. The sharp distinction that once existed between ASSP and ASIC designs has become somewhat blurred promising the difference will disappear altogether in a near future. Irrespective to their implementation methods, designs are expected to become increasingly more predictable and take less time to do. The bottom line for most design or semiconductor companies is how many engineering dollars need to be invested in a given design to create a maximum in revenue and more important in earnings.Therefore in the era of SOC design the quality of a design cannot only be determined whether the design meets the specification or not. The new quality criteria are related to the total costs a design creates during its entire lifetime. The longer a design stays alive or the more reincarnations it has in various silicon systems the more income a design can create. Factors like Reliability, Flexibility, Portability or Reusability are becoming more and more important for the success of a design. Experts from semiconductor companies, fabless design houses; EDA vendor and universities discuss what has to happen or what they do to ensure quality of their designs in an economic way.