The verification standard
"Verified" is the most abused word in the IP business. Here is exactly what it means on this platform — the rules we apply to our own cores and to everything we import.
Claims must be reproducible
Every number on a datasheet — test counts, coverage, timing — regenerates from the repository with a documented command. If a claim can't be reproduced, it doesn't get published.
Independent oracles
Reference models must not share a derivation with the RTL. Our FCS suites check against zlib's CRC-32; the UDP checksum suite computes the RFC 768/1071 sum from scratch while the RTL uses a folded-length trick. A model written from the same reading of the spec can agree with the RTL for the wrong reason — so we don't allow it.
Test the degenerate case explicitly
Single-beat frames, single ports, single-word tags, non-contiguous byte enables. Ten of the ten upstream RTL defects our campaign has found were exactly this shape: general case fine, degenerate case silently broken. It is never assumed to 'fall out' of the general path.
Assert the thing that fails silently
Wrong routing doesn't hang — it delivers correct-looking data to the wrong place. Suites assert which port received the data, which tag landed on which frame, which header paired with which payload.
Suites must be able to fail
An all-green suite proves nothing by itself. We mutation-test: inject plausible defects into the RTL and require the suite to catch every one. When a suite exists to guard one behaviour, the mutation of that behaviour must be caught by exactly that test.
Honest limitations, in writing
The 10G MAC misses 156.25 MHz on an Artix-7 -1 — the datasheet says so and makes no 10G hardware claim there. Vendor IO cells only simulate behaviourally — counted out of coverage, with the reason. An unverified stack says 'not verified' in bold, not in a footnote.
The receipts
This standard has found ten real RTL defects in widely-used open-source cores — dropped single-beat frames, byte counts of zero on valid input, modules that could not elaborate in legal configurations. Each fix is documented at the point of change with the reasoning, and each IP's page lists what was found under its Verification tab. The whole-tree regression — 1,235 tests across the imported families plus native suites and formal proofs on our own — runs green before anything ships.