Quality and reliability of digital soft IP core and a qualification framework

Quality and reliability of IP block is essential to the successful development of today´s complex SoC design. In this paper, we discuss vital issues about the quality and reliability of digital soft IP, and propose a qualification metric system which is able to evaluate IP quality and reliability. The metric system consists of nine parts to characterize IP quality and reliability. Based on this metric system, we propose an extensive IP qualification framework. XML schema technique is used to describe the quality and reliability model, which can be easily extended to accommodate new qualification criteria. As a case study, the presented framework has been used to qualify three open source IP cores. The experimental results show that the metric system and the qualification framework presented in this paper can not only evaluate IP quality and reliability quantitatively, but also accelerate the qualification process and improve accuracy of qualification results.