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In my last blog, I gave a few examples of different ways of thinking about getting more work done by finding solutions that increase amount of work accomplished per cycle, instead of just a brute-force approach to the problem. Before I talk about advanced verification solutions, I want to talk about why performance even matters.

First, we all intuitively know that the sooner we find a bug, the cheaper it is to fix. Doug Josephson and Bob Gottlieb attempt to quantify this notion in their chapter “Silicon Debug,” from the book Advances in Electronic Testing: Challenges and Methodologies (Springer, 2006). Figure 1 summarizes their findings in terms of the relative cost of finding bugs within a typical design cycle. Notice that a functional bug that prevents us from achieving first silicon success can cost us 10,000 X or more to fix than if it was found during the initial design phase.

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