2024 Wilson Research Group FPGA functional verification trend report

The 2024 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study provides a detailed examination of trends in FPGA functional verification. The findings highlight the growing complexity of FPGA designs and the corresponding increase in verification challenges. While FPGAs continue to offer advantages such as flexibility and cost-effectiveness, their evolving use in applications like AI acceleration and system-on-chip (SoC) designs necessitates advanced verification methodologies. Alarmingly, 87 percent of projects reported non-trivial bug escapes into production, emphasizing the need for robust pre-lab verification practices. The report also explores the adoption of verification languages, formal technologies and methodologies, revealing trends that suggest a shift toward greater verification maturity. This study underscores the urgent need for connected, data-driven and scalable verification solutions to meet the demands of modern FPGA projects.

Contents

I. Introduction

A. The global FPGA C semiconductor market

B. Study background

C. Study confidence interval

D. Study bias

E. Report organization

II. FPGA verification effectiveness

A. Non-trivial bug escapes

B. Types of flaws resulting in non-trivial bug escapes

C. Design completion compared to original schedule

III. FPGA verification effort

A. Percentage of project time spent in verification

B. Mean peak number of engineers

IV. FPGA design trends

A. Embedded processor cores

B. Asynchronous clock domains

C. Security features

D. Safety-critical design

V. FPGA verification adoption trends

A. Verification languages and methodology adoption trends

B. Verification technology adoption trends

VI. Conclusion