Harnessing Data Science for the HW Verification Process

Modern verification is a highly automated process that involves many tools and subsystems. These verification tools, which we sometime refer to as data sources, produce large amount of data that is essential for understanding the state and progress of the verification process. The growing complexity in the verification and the amount of data it produces, and the complex relations between the data sources calls for data science techniques such as statistics, data visualization, data mining, and machine learning to extract the essence of the input data and present it to the users in a simple and clear manner.

The goal of the talk is to show how we can harness the powers of data science into tools and systems that improve the verification process and assist verification teams in understanding and managing these processes. we begin with a brief overview of the challenges and benefits of building a system that stores, processes and analyze the verification data of verification projects. We then briefly describe various components and aspects in such a system. The main focus of the talk is on specific analysis techniques that cover the entire spectrum of descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analysis. This talk is based on a tutorial with the same title given at ASP-DAC this year.
Dr. Avi Ziv is a Research Staff Member in the Verification and Quality Technologies Department at the IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa, Israel. Since joining IBM in 1996, Avi has been working on developing technologies and methodologies for various topics of simulations-based functional verification including stimuli generation, checking, functional coverage and coverage directed generation. In recent years, the main focus of Avi's work is bringing data science to the hardware verification world.

Avi received the B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the Technion  Israel Institute of Technology in 1990 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He is the author of more than 50 papers and the inventor of more than 10 patents, mostly in the area of functional verification.