IEC TR 62248 pdf download – Approaches to conformance and certification testing for design automation standards
4 Diversity of feeder organizations The approach to conformance and certification methodology for TC 93 must take into account the diversity of the international organizations that feed standards into TC 93. This diversity is a strength of TC 93 within the international Electronic Design Automation community; however it does add some complexity; such as with regard to conformance and certification methodologies. Due to the diversity of feeder organizations that input standards to TC 93 it would be very difficult to enforce a strict formal methodology, the goal of TC 93 should be to encourage the implementation of an effective methodology for conformance and certification that puts a minimal burden on the feeder organizations. Because of the diverse and international nature of TC 93,and the difficulty in identifying resources to apply to the task of standards development, including the related activity of conformance and certification, a generalized set of guidelines is needed. This report is intended as an initial definition of these guidelines.
This report is also intended to identify the benefits of conformance and certification for TC 93 members and their constituents, in an effort to help them justify the necessary resources to support conformance and certification. This will be an ongoing and iterative process, whereby lessons learned are incorporated into the report. There are for example many concepts from the STEP approach that can be applied to the TC 93 domain. The emphasis will be on test suite specifications, because TC 93 does not wish to become a developer or maintainer of the executable test suites. It is, however, intended that TC 93/WG 5: Test validation, conformance and qualification technologies, should provide guidelines (which will later become requirements) for development of test suite specifications which should be incorporated with or referenced by any standard submitted to TC 93.
5 Benefits of conformance and certification testing One of the most critical aspects of a certification program is having it be accepted by the industry, and primarily the suppliers since they are most directly affected by the program. The suppliers (EDA vendors in this case) should be involved as early as possible in the definition of a certification program in order to ensure it’s success.
It is reasonable to ask the question “what is the point of certification?” It is not just assurance of some level of quality. Usually certification conjures up notions of compatibility, inter- operability, and portability (see MALLIS in clause 1 2). In industry today, interoperability tests often refer to the testing, via pair wise matching, of specific applications. This is a very expensive proposition especially as the number of applications to be certified increases. In some cases, the certification of the application program interfaces (APIs) themselves provides a high level of interoperability. POSIX is a case in point. There is no explicit interoperability certification involved in the POSIX certification.
However, one of the results of POSIX certification is the ability of different Unix implementations to interoperate at certain levels. This is due to the fact that the POSIX standard itself provides good coverage of the domain for which it is intended. Interoperability or compatibility are loose terms that suggest some kind of cooperation or harmony among unlike components of a system. These terms have been applied to features ranging from “is written in the same language” to “can read ASCII” to “plug-and-play”. Portability is often mentioned when defining interoperability goals, and it usually means the ability to move a program or piece of data around among different environments and still be able to use it with a minimum of effort, even though the program may be very unlike other components in design or function. Conformance and certification programs can also stimulate the marketplace, because they give customers a level of assurance that the products they purchase will work with their existing infrastructure.
If for example a company currently has installed tools from company “A” but is interested in acquiring a tool from company “B”, they would be less apprehensive about such a purchase if there were some formal mechanism in place by which they could gain assurance that the tools from these different companies would interoperate. Conformance and certification testing can provide such assurance if the program is well implemented. Another benefit to having conformance and certification programs in place (which assumes that test suites are available) is that the developers of conformant applications greatly benefit from the use of the test suites during their development process. Finding conformance problems early in the development process is another benefit. In addition, running the test suites often helps improve the overall quality of the product by identifying issues that might have been overlooked if the test suite had not been run against the application. One of the key goals of WG 5’s conformance and certification plan is to support the WG 1 : Electronical data harmonization (Approaches, methodologies and technologies), architecture for TC 93 which is based on the concept of a “core-model” (see Figure 1 .) and also the requirement for overlapping standards to demonstrate an interoperability plan.
The first step of any interoperability plan would be to demonstrate that a new standard has the minimum amount of information necessary to translate a portion of a design file into another standard format with which it shares some common information.
IEC TR 62248 pdf download – Approaches to conformance and certification testing for design automation standards
