[reflexe]

Not sure i am following, what problem your product is trying to solve? helping to write tests/run the tests/just organizing tests as a part of the CI pipeline? How is it different than just running tests? (Or is it the platform to run tests on?) If you are trying to do CI for silicon, then what is your target market? From my experience, companies that design their own silicon are usually big enough to have their own custom pipeline for testing and verification and it would be quite difficult to convince them to switch. Smaller companies get help from larger companies in development and verification.

Do you have any tooling that won’t require the developer to write tests? (E.g. something that will ‘work’ with no effort from the developer’s POV - kind of sonarqube for vhdl/verilog)

In any case, good luck. Glad to see some HW-related startups.

[pkkim]

Hey, thanks!

CI is one component of our platform. Most other CI tools are pretty agnostic about how tests are structured, though. We also integrate a way to structure your tests into groups so you can control when each test is called. For example, if one test out of 500 fails, it's super easy to rerun that one test with verbose logging and wave dumping enabled. We then also track test pass/fails over time, have tools to leave comments for coworkers on waveforms and logs in the browser like in Google Docs, etc.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "Smaller companies get help from larger companies in development and verification"?

[reflexe]

In my experience in two HW companies that developed their own ASICs (one as a startup and one as a publicity traded company), we never developed any chip fully by ourself. In all of the cases there was another large company who helped to make the project work so we will actually end up with wafers.

If you are not at the scale of NVIDIA/intel and release a new silicon every other month, it is not worth it to recruit so many people for a relatively short period. However, I am not fully sure how involved they were in the pre-silicon verification process, but at least in some cases they were very involved in the development.

[bgnn]

That's not correct. I've worked from start-ups to semiconductor giants. Always the first option to develop everything in house, if you can find the talent. This is pretty much industry standard.

[ancharm]

What ASIC/semi start up that you know of is developing everything in house? That is absurdly complex and hundreds of millions of dollars...

[bgnn]

Pretty much most of them. They might buy a small IP or two here and there, but for the rest everyone develops their design mostly in house. It's not 100s of millions, that's a ridiculous amount of money unless you are designing like a huge CPU or TPU or so. We design (can't give company name) quite large chips with complex analog and digital in 7nm and 5nm as a start-up and our seed funding was less than 20 million. This is kind of bare minimum funding for a semi start-up anyhow.