tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17864065.post-85147322321790515232008-07-21T10:18:00.007-04:002008-07-21T14:25:15.147-04:00I got into a discussion last night with someone about the parallels between auto manufacturing (that is, U.S. auto manufacturing of the 70s) and chip design -- about how there is a focus on improving verification, without considering the impact that design has had on this. This person mentioned a slide that he used to have with a quote by W. Edwards Deming on it -- I've used the same quotes from Deming, I am guessing:<br /><blockquote>Inspection with the aim of finding the bad ones and throwing them out is too late, ineffective, costly. In the first place, you can't find the bad ones, not all of them. Second, it costs too much. Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process.<br /><br />The old way: Inspect bad quality out.<br /><br />The new way: Build good quality in.</blockquote><br />People have said that design is not the long pole of the tent. I presume that they mean that verification or software development is the long pole. I believe we have a design problem. We need to find ways to build good quality in -- there is nothing like avoiding bugs in the first place. You can never find all the bugs if you depend on inspecting the bad quality out. Low level design forces a protracted specification/architecture phase where micro-architecture details are too often planned out and prematurely committed -- and this delays verification integration/bringup. A plethora of bugs causes too much time doing debug and not enough time writing and running tests during verification.<br /><br />There's no doubt that verification is killing us -- but it's important to diagnose the root cause of this. Continuing to add more verification engineers will not stem the root cause.<br /><br />The U.S. auto industry thought they could inspect for quality in the 70s -- it took the Japanese to prove them wrong.George Harperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12782319843580094075noreply@blogger.com0