Northrop Grumman Italia
Northrop Grumman Italia Gains DO-254 Compliance
A Mentor Consulting engagement allowed Northrop Grumman Italia to meet DO-254 compliance requirements, and use SystemVerilog and ReqTracer to improve it's verification process.
Northrop Grumman Italia and DO-254 Compliance for FPGAs
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ReqTracer
product overview: Manage requirements in your FPGA and ASIC design flows. ReqTracer simplifies, automates and enables requirements traceability from specification of the hardware specification through HDL coding, implementation and validation.
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Questa® Advanced Simulator
product overview: The Questa® Advanced Simulator combines high performance and capacity simulation with unified advanced debug capabilities for the most complete native support of Verilog, SystemVerilog, VHDL, SystemC, PSL and UPF
Author and Senior Mentor Consultant Peet James presents a sample of our solution in this Verification Planning & Management Module. Mr. James explains how to transform the typically open-ended verification... View Video
The Problem: DO-254 Compliance Mandated
When a customer mandated DO-254 compliance for the complex hardware of Northrop Grumman Italia’s (NGI) navigation systems, they needed a program to bring their development process into alignment with DO-254 category level A. This transition also opened up the possibility of improving their FPGA verification process. The problem was that compliance can add time and costs to projects. NGI wanted to avoid risk to schedules and budgets
The Solution: A Solution of Tools, Technology and Services
Mentor Consulting assessed the situation and recommended SystemVerilog covergroups and assertions coupled with an integrated test plan that could be traced against requirements using the Questa verification platform and its ReqTracer requirements tracability tool. Once the methodology was proven on one production FPGA, the consultants could pass the knowledge to the customer for two more to further prove the process, then for all future work.
The Results: Advanced Verification Success
All three devices were verified with 100% code and functional coverage and completed traceability of requirements through a verification procedure to simulation results. The simulation coverage data was merged with a test plan, which gave proof of requirement verification so that the verification results could be linked back to the design requirements.
NGI was surprised to find that the verification took less time to implement, that more bugs were found early, and issues were easier to debug.