Post-silicon Validation & Bring-up Labs

First silicon bring-up, the lab as networked infrastructure, bench reservation and hardware-in-the-loop CI, voltage, temperature and frequency shmoo sweeps, and tracing lab failures to RTL through a results pipeline.

Overview

Why this topic

When the first packaged parts come back from the foundry, the clock starts on the most expensive weeks of the project. The team has to prove the chip powers up, boots, meets its frequency and power targets across voltage and temperature, and find every bug that escaped pre-silicon verification, fast enough to decide whether the next stepping is a cheap metal-only fix or a full respin.

The lab where that happens is infrastructure: dozens to hundreds of validation boards, each wired to programmable power supplies, a JTAG debugger, a serial console, a networked power switch and sometimes an oscilloscope and a thermal head. A DevOps or infrastructure engineer turns that lab into a shared, reservable, automated system whose results land in a database, the same way a server fleet runs CI.

Interview questions

Walk me through first silicon bring-up, and what you have prepared before the parts arrive.
Design the infrastructure for a validation lab with 150 benches shared by 60 engineers across two sites.
How do you run hardware-in-the-loop CI for firmware on a small number of expensive boards?
Design a characterization sweep: voltage, temperature and frequency shmoo over many parts. How long does it take and how do you run it?
A test fails on silicon that passed every pre-silicon run. How do you take it from a lab symptom to an RTL root cause and a fix?
Design the results pipeline for the lab. What do you store, and what questions must it answer?

Post-silicon Validation & Bring-up Labs

Overview

Why this topic

Interview questions

More AI Infrastructure topics