Role of the verification team throughout the ASIC development life cycle

Traditionally the development of ASICs within a company like Cisco has been tightly coupled with the development of a single end product. However the increasing costs associated with the development of high end ASICs has forced a fundamental shift in the ASIC development process. No longer is it acceptable to develop an ASIC that can only be used in a single product. Instead, the expectation is that ASICs under current development will have a much longer life span and will be used across not just multiple generations of the same product, but in multiple different products across the company. This has a number of consequences on the ASICs themselves and the manner in which they are developed. In this paper, we discuss the impact on the ASIC development process and the expanded role the verification team now plays throughout the development process in ensuring that ASICs once delivered meet the expectations of the product teams.