Kind of.

I regularly hear that part of why designers don’t have time for unit testing RTL is because they’re under extreme pressure to deliver RTL to PD. I have very little experience in this direction but I think it’s so PD can get on with floorplanning and <whatever it is they do>. The thing about the early RTL drops is that they almost always happen before any meaningful verification is done. They tend to be very buggy, sometimes borderline non-functional, but they must be useful otherwise the pressure wouldn’t exist.

While I don’t totally understand the reasoning, I do understand the pressure. When a design engineer says there’s no time for unit testing, I shrug my shoulders and sympathize as best I can.

Then I get thinking… what if there’s a way we could relieve the pressure by giving designers a way to deliver buggy, non-functional RTL faster than ever to PD? With the added breathing room, they could add a few unit tests as they code.

This is where Poser comes in. Continue reading →