If owners and managers were to track the time spent on feature development vs. operational friction at a fabless design shop without DV Ops and a modern DV approach, they would be horrified. We know they would find low productivity because we have observed homebrew approaches in the field. What seems like a simple task becomes an endless project, becoming a bottleneck to designers and sapping resources.

There is of course overhead in setting up a proper design verification system and a learning curve for designers. Does the effort justify the results?

According to our analysis, the advantages far outweigh the up-front costs when building upon hardened DV Ops tools and proven VIP libraries. After designers spend a week or so learning the ropes, much of the complexity disappears into the fabric of the development stack. This reduces operational friction by:

The biggest immediate advantage gained from DV Ops is continuous integration. This provides automatic, nearly instantaneous feedback on design changes as they are checked in. If features break, a full report is generated showing which tests failed and which changes broke the code. All stakeholders are alerted. If no problems are found, success is confirmation, and the design process advances.

By contrast, fabless design shops without continuous integration depend on engineers to “do the right thing” and run the correct set of tests by hand before committing their changes. The team must wait for regression reports run over-night and designers get the bad news the following morning.