Helping accelerate NVM Express SSD controller development through rapid scaling of verification team

A Productive Partnership

Our client, a US customer in the flash storage domain, was developing a DRAM-Less NVMe SSD from the ground up. As the program moved into silicon development, the company needed to rapidly scale its design verification (DV) organization by hiring engineers with deep expertise in SSD controllers, storage protocols, and silicon verification methodologies.

Business Challenge

The customer initially attempted to expand its captive engineering center. However, scaling proved difficult due to the limited availability of experienced verification engineers with deep knowledge of SSD controller architecture and relevant protocols such as PCI Express, NVM Express, and ONFI etc. Also, increased operational expenses and resource attrition made the challenge even harder.

Opportunity

The client needed a trusted engineering partner capable of quickly assembling a highly skilled verification team while maintaining product quality and execution speed.

Our objective was to deploy a reliable DV team with strong storage-domain expertise on a short timeline.

Value Created

GlobalLogic shortened the customer’s Time-to-Tape-Out by augmenting their DV capacity and expertise, accelerating design closure by 30%.

We quickly ramped up and deployed a team with expertise in storage architecture and protocols, starting with block-level verification. 

GlobalLogic improved the customer’s verification coverage by developing enhanced UVM-based verification environments, test plans, assertions, functional coverage, and constrained-random testing.

Over time, the engagement expanded to End-to-End design verification, covering sub-system and SoC-level verification.

We improved the customer’s regression efficiency through automation, reusable verification components, coverage-driven verification and optimized test suites.

GlobalLogic owned a major portion of block-level and chip-level verification across multiple generations of their SSD controller chips. The engagement was successfully executed using a 100% offshore delivery model, bringing substantial cost benefits to the customer.

We bolstered the customer’s SSD & Protocol Domain expertise by introducing engineers skilled in a variety of disciplines such as PCIe/NVMe, NAND Flash, DDR/LPDDR, ONFI/Toggle interfaces, DMA, and controller architectures.

GlobalLogic enabled early bug detection for the customer, reducing costly silicon respins and post-silicon debugging.

We enabled the customer to rapidly scale the DV team during peak development phases without building permanent internal capacity.

Semiconductor company shortened verification cycles and accelerated design closure by 30%

Impact

The client achieved substantial cost savings compared to their captive center while gaining access to a more experienced and reliable team. 

We deployed a team in India to augment the customer’s US team, reducing the cost of DV engineering by 40%.

The client successfully completed multiple tape-outs and reached high-volume customer shipments in record time.

With our continued support, the client was also able to design and ship both client- and enterprise-class SSDs.