Mentor Graphics

Traditional engineering verification methods meant that most problems weren't discovered early in the design cycle, and debugging the problems often resulted in serious delays in getting the product to market. Computer-aided verification and analysis tools have yet to achieve widespread use, but verification is quickly becoming a business issue instead of just an engineering problem. To get boards out faster, we must take existing verification tools and technologies and apply them earlier in the design process—what is known as a "left shift"—and apply the concept of virtual prototyping where the entire design is verified using computer simulations. This paper discuses one of many types of verification, signal integrity (SI), how it has been integrated into the design flow, and ways to improve verification tools among all users involved in the design cycle.