Documentation First! unifies design flow

Ankur Krishna , Ritesh Agrawal , Gourav Modi & Neeraj Chandak
EDN (June 08, 2015)

With aggressive time to market, cycle time reduction has been an unending goal. In this race of cycle time reduction, documentation often takes a back seat. Early and correct documentation is necessary for internal teams like verification and application, and for the end customer to meet SoC deadlines.

In conventional flow, documentation was updated when the designer found time; usually late in the cycle. This practice had lead to delays and iterations in stabilizing the SoC verification process. Hence, the pre-Si validation and the application team were also enabled late in cycle. The only way to move forward was to ensure that duplication was avoided and cycle time was gained. This lead to development of a flow where the designer felt incentivized to follow what we call Documentation First!

Documentation First! is not only a mindset to do documentation before design, but a whole tool-based methodology.

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