Questa One Unified Coverage Solution: Transforming Verification Through Intelligence

The landscape of semiconductor verification has reached a critical tipping point. What was once manageable through brute force — adding more tests, more compute power, more engineers has become an unsustainable approach. The 2024 Wilson Research Group study puts hard numbers to what verification engineers experience daily: 75% of IC/ASIC projects are missing their schedules, up from an already concerning 66% in previous years.

Behind these missed deadlines lies a fundamental shift in design complexity. Today’s chips aren’t just bigger, they’re fundamentally more intricate. When 84% of projects incorporate embedded processors, verification engineers aren’t just checking logic paths; they’re verifying complex interactions between hardware and software, power states, security features, and timing scenarios that can spawn millions of corner cases.

Figure 1. Percentage of IC/ASIC project time spent in verification.

The impact ripples through every aspect of verification. Engineers find themselves spending precious hours analyzing coverage reports, only to discover that adding more tests barely moves the coverage needle past 85%. Debug sessions that once took days now stretch into weeks as teams navigate through layers of interconnected functionality. Regression suites grow exponentially, yet critical corner cases remain elusive.

This is where the Questa™ One unified coverage solution fundamentally changes the verification landscape. Instead of throwing more resources at the problem, it brings intelligence to the verification process. When a coverage plateau hits, the solution automatically analyzes patterns in existing tests to generate precisely targeted new tests. While engineers debug an issue, real-time coverage feedback shows exactly which scenarios they’re exploring. As regression suites run, machine learning algo­rithms continuously optimize test selection, eliminating redundancy while ensuring comprehensive coverage.

The results speak through hard numbers that matter to verification engineers: coverage goals achieved with 500x fewer tests, debug time slashed by 30%, and regression time reduced by more than a third. These aren’t just metrics; they repre­sent real engineering hours saved, deadlines met, and design quality improved.