IC/ASIC Functional Verification Trend Report - 2024
The 2024 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study provides an in-depth analysis of trends in IC/ASIC functional verification. The findings reveal the mounting challenges of verifying increasingly complex designs, driven by the rise of SoC-class architectures, security, safter-critical requirements and asynchronous clock domains. Alarmingly, first-silicon success rates have declined to their lowest level in two decades, with only 14 percent of projects achieving this milestone.
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INTRODUCTION
To mitigate these challenges, the study highlights the growing adoption of advanced methodologies, including SystemVerilog, UVM and formal verification techniques. This report underscores the critical need for connected, data-driven and scalable verification solutions to address the industry’s rapid evolution and concerns about the talent gap in design and verification engineering.
This report examines the trends in functional verification for integrated circuits (ICs) and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) as identified in the 2024 Wilson Research Group study. This study continues a series of industry analyses conducted over the past two decades.1,2,3,4 For the 2024 study, we have distinguished between FPGA and IC/ASIC functional verification trends, with this report concentrating on the latter.
A. The Global IC/ASIC Semiconductor Market
IBS estimates that the global semiconductor market was valued at $547 billion in 2021. While the market faced a decline to approximately $526.8 billion in 2023 due to economic challenges and reduced demand, it is projected to recover strongly, reaching a value of $635 billion by 2025.5 The IC/ASIC portion of the semiconductor market, excluding FPGAs, was valued at approximately $431.8 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow further as demand for advanced technologies accelerates. Key drivers of this growth include the proliferation of artificial intelligence applications and the widespread adoption of 5G smartphones, which continue to propel innovation and demand across the industry.
B. Study Background
The results presented in this report continue a series of nine industry studies on functional verification conducted from 2007 to the present 2024 study.3,4 Each of these studies was modeled after the 2002 and 2004 studies by Collett International Research, Inc. studies.1,2
For our study, we constructed a randomized sampling frame from multiple acquired industry lists, covering all regions of the world and relevant electronics industry market segments. Notably, we excluded our account team’s customer list to prevent vendor bias in the final results. While we designed the study questions and analyzed the results, we commissioned Wilson Research Group to execute the study. After cleaning the data to remove inconsistent, incomplete, or random responses, the final sample size consisted of 597 eligible participants (n=597).
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