How similar is an ASIC verification job compared to a Software job

An ASIC Verification or SOC Verification job is the same and different than a Software job profile in the same breath. In Software jobs, coding and debugging is one of the important aspects. However, both are becoming very much alike in today's technological era. The difference can be in the perspective of thought process i.e., for an AIC verification engineering profile, one needs to think very much like a hardware engineer but at the same time add a tint of software practices (programming and debugging) into action.

Almost the entire building block of Verification – writing test benches, generation of stimulus, building models, regression files, etc. requires coding skills which is a software skill.

In the semiconductor industry, the majority of the technical nodes consist of various complicated design structures and such designs are coded using Hardware Description Language (a programming language to define hardware models). These designs are developed to be produced and made ready for the consumer market but before this stage, such designs are essentially needed to get verified following a chain of processes. The development cycle in the semiconductor industry is the same as in the software industry – ideation, planning, design development, verification, production, market.

ASIC Verification job includes the job of testing or verification. The design models are exposed to the flow of functional verification or formal verification where each block is verified for its functionality as per the design specification or datasheet using simulation and the test bench architecture. Verification architectures are coded using object-oriented programming concept-based System Verilog language and the UVM and methodology.

Most semiconductor companies have the criteria of coding skills as an eligibility parameter in the job descriptions. This can be considered as another similarity to software job profiles.

The majority of the design and the verification architectures are developed by a vast team and include the continuous integration for developing and releasing of the IPs are acquired by the Verification engineers same as the Software Testing engineers.

There is a lot of scope in verification engineering profiles for software engineers too as automation of the implementation routines is scripted using languages like Python/Perl.

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