Hardware Bugs Need to Die

I used to accept bugs as a part of what happens in hardware development. Start a new project, write a bunch of code, deal with the bugs that inevitably arise, stress out about whether I can fix them before development milestones, cross my fingers that regressions pass the day before tape-out, repeat.

After several years of acceptance I’ve started taking bugs personally. I hate bugs. They’re no longer acceptable and I’ve changed the way I write code to avoid the embarrassment of creating them. For me that means using SVUnit to unit test my testbench code as I write it.

Knowing that test-driven development and unit testing with SVUnit has improved my code in every way, that others have found the same and that it’s become an option for everyone, I’ve turned advocating for SVUnit into a bit of a hobby…


svunit-smokes

I’ve grown to attribute bugs not so much to developer ability or quality of specification or language or other commonly held positions but to the habits we rely on to write design and testbench code. Primarily, I’m talking our debug later approach to writing code. Write the RTL then debug the RTL; write the testbench then debug the testbench. We don’t think about it, we just do it. It’s a habit. It kills our productivity, just like cigarettes kill people.

While EDA reacts to long debug cycles by investing in new debug tools, the only way I see to improve quality is by adopting proactive coding techniques (test-driven development being one option that I personally use. There are others). But before we do anything, we need to realize that bugs are formed out of habit. Kick the habit and voila… fewer bugs. Continue reading