FAQ

Tapeout verifies an entire SoC autonomously. Its agents take a design from spec through signoff, working from one continuously updated dependency graph of the design, the verification environment and the runs. Ledger, Tapeout’s record of the program, keeps every run, revision and verdict. It’s the first system built to prove which verification verdicts still hold after every change. On a large SoC, with thousands of changes a week, that decides how much verification has to run again and how much of it can be trusted.

The agents generate tests, investigate failures, drive verification, and close coverage and regression loops on their own, inside the limits your team sets. Engineers set the direction, review the evidence and keep signoff.

Tapeout is terminal‑native. It runs inside the engineer’s existing workspace, alongside the EDA tools, Git, Slack, Tcl scripts, logs and revisions where chip engineers already work. When the design changes, it works out what changed across the chip, investigates what broke and why, changes the right artifacts and runs the tools, and learns from every result and decision.

Your team leaves for the evening and the agents keep going. They run the regressions, triage every failure, trace each one to the change behind it and post what they find to Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Jira or your SVN or Perforce workflow. In the morning an engineer reviews the findings, keeps the right ones and sends back the rest. It’s an extra set of eyes that catches bugs before tape‑out.

They read RTL well, and they don’t have to understand everything to be useful. What matters is the harness around them. Tapeout lets the agents iterate against your simulators and formal tools many times faster than a person can, and nothing counts until a tool run or a deterministic check confirms it.

It changes the job. The agents take the iteration, reruns, triage and bookkeeping, and engineers move up to the decisions that need judgment, setting specs and trade‑offs, reviewing evidence and owning signoff. A chip that once took a hundred engineers can be built by five, and those five do the most consequential work on the program.

No. Tapeout is the harness the agents run in, and it drives the simulators, formal tools and emulators you already license. Every verdict comes from a tool run or a deterministic check, and models only decide where to look.

After a three‑line RTL edit, you shouldn’t have to rerun everything. The validity kernel checks each earlier verdict against the dependency graph and tells you which ones still hold, which ones the change broke, and which it can’t be sure about yet. For those, the agents run the few extra checks that settle it. Models help decide where to look, but a verdict is never marked safe just because the diff looks harmless. You can follow one change end to end on how it works.

Most AI verification tools add an agent to one step, like writing a testbench, generating assertions or summarizing a failing log, or put a copilot inside a single vendor’s tool. They’re useful, and they start from scratch on every task. Tapeout is built around the whole program. It keeps one dependency graph of the design, the verification environment and the runs, and Ledger keeps every verdict across revisions, so after a change it knows which of your verdicts still hold without rerunning everything. It works across Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens and open‑source tools at once, runs fully air‑gapped, and every verdict comes from a tool run, never from a model’s say‑so. EDA is built around tools. Tapeout is built around the work.

Yes, and they work well together. The agents you use today, from your EDA vendor or anyone else, are good at the task in front of them. Tapeout sits underneath the whole program. Whatever reached a verdict, a vendor’s agent, ours or one of your engineers, Ledger records it with the revision and the evidence behind it. After every change, Tapeout tells you which verdicts still hold, whichever tool or agent produced them. That’s the record a program signs off from.

It carries the engineering loop, from design to verify, debug, fix and validate, across every revision. A task tool hands you an answer and forgets it. Tapeout keeps the evidence behind each result, so the next change starts from what’s already proven.

No. Tapeout runs alongside your existing flow and drives the tools you already use, so nothing gets replaced. Most teams start with one bounded piece of a live design, a subsystem or an integration boundary, and widen it once the results earn it.

Waveforms already record what happened. Tapeout keeps a machine‑readable causal trace of why it happened, what changed and what that means for the next revision, so a 500 GB dump becomes the handful of events that matter. The full waveform stays available, and no engineer has to rediscover the causal path by hand every time the chip changes.

Yes. Give Tapeout the SoC reference manual (RM) or technical reference manual (TRM), the spec, the register descriptions and the RTL, and it generates a system‑on‑chip verification plan across all 23 areas an SoC plan has to cover. Every item traces from a requirement to the tests, coverage points, regressions and waivers that close it, and the agents then run that plan with your tools.

IP boundaries, connectivity, cross‑IP flows, performance, blast radius, power modes, clocks, resets, CDC, RDC, X‑initialization, pin muxing, error handling and safety, security, debug, boot, memory and system, interconnect, processor integration, fuses and OTP, product variants, gate‑level and static signoff, and closure from requirements to tests, coverage, regression and waivers.

Yes. Pick any publicly available vendor SoC reference manual or TRM and we’ll generate the full SoC‑level verification plan from it in a demo, so you can judge the depth on a chip you already know. Talk to us to set one up.

It uses LLMs and generative AI where they help, reading the RM and spec, planning and deciding where to look, inside a harness where every verdict comes from a simulator, a formal tool or a deterministic check. That’s the difference between AI that writes a plan and AI engineering you can sign off on.

Digital today. Tapeout verifies digital designs from RTL through gate level. Analog and mixed‑signal (AMS) verification is on our roadmap, including SPICE netlists, schematic versus post‑layout extracted simulation with parasitics, Verilog‑A and Verilog‑AMS behavioural models, and spec‑driven targets such as gain‑bandwidth, noise, SNDR and ENOB. The same harness carries over, with agents iterating against the simulator until the numbers close.

SystemVerilog and Verilog RTL, UVM and cocotb testbenches, SystemVerilog assertions and formal properties, and register descriptions such as SystemRDL and IP‑XACT.

Full‑chip SoC verification, from IP boundaries and connectivity through clocks, resets, power, CDC and RDC, security, boot, debug, interconnect and processor integration, to gate‑level and static signoff and closure, across block, subsystem and full‑chip levels. It’s design verification, functional verification and hardware verification in one system.

At every IP boundary Tapeout checks addressing, access rules, privilege and security attributes, and reset and power behaviour, so each block behaves as the reference manual says when the rest of the SoC talks to it.

Yes. Bus, clock, reset, interrupt (IRQ), DMA, pin, sideband, power and debug connectivity, checked for every block so nothing is miswired between the RTL and the spec.

Yes. DMA, interrupt, trigger and wake‑up flows, data paths that cross several IPs, and multi‑master scenarios where more than one initiator contends for the same resource.

Bandwidth, latency, arbitration, QoS and DVFS, measured against the targets in the spec and rechecked when a change could move them.

We start with digital design verification and expand across the chip program, into firmware, timing and power, physical design, analog and mixed‑signal, packaging, photonics and post‑silicon evidence. Each domain creates engineering evidence that changes over time, and Tapeout is built to carry that evidence forward across revisions.

No. Tapeout verifies the design. Place and route, timing closure and physical signoff stay with your physical design flow.

Yes. Tapeout reads your spec and targets, so it knows what the program is optimizing for. A phone SoC weighs power first, a data‑center accelerator weighs performance and latency, and the agents plan, prioritize and flag regressions against the power, performance and area (PPA) targets your team actually set.

Yes. Small teams on a first or second chip often have little CAD support and no room for tools nobody has time to learn. Tapeout runs in the terminal alongside the flow you already have, acts as the verification and debug support a larger team would staff, and doesn’t add another GUI to the workspace.

Programs where a respin is not an option. AI accelerators and GPUs, hyperscaler custom silicon, CPUs, mobile and consumer SoCs, networking and interconnect, and safety‑critical automotive and aerospace.

Yes. It reads and extends SystemVerilog UVM environments, including sequences, scoreboards, agents, verification IP (VIP) and RAL register models, and runs constrained‑random and directed tests alongside C tests running on the SoC’s processors.

Yes. The agents write constrained‑random and directed tests, UVM sequences, and SystemVerilog assertions (SVA) and cover properties for formal property verification, each one checked by running it before it counts.

It reads code coverage and functional coverage from your runs, finds the coverage holes, writes the tests or covergroups that close them, and keeps closed coverage from being reopened by a change that couldn’t have affected it. It’s coverage‑driven verification that remembers what it already proved.

Yes. It buckets failures by root cause, separates new failures from known ones, traces each to the change and the transaction behind it with the waveform attached, and proposes the fix. Engineers review the diagnosis instead of starting from a log.

The way a good engineer would, only faster. It compares the design against a golden reference model, such as a Python or C model of the datapath, isolates the block where behaviour first diverges, bisects the revisions and blocks until one is left, and only then digs into that block’s RTL and waveforms. Our demo traces a failing check to one write at 4,430 ns this way.

It doesn’t paste them into a model. Parsers read the RTL, netlists, logs and waveforms (VCD and FSDB) into the dependency graph as facts, and the agents query only the slice that matters to the question. The model reasons over the few hundred lines that matter, and every conclusion goes back to a tool to confirm.

That’s where most of the expensive ones hide. Implicit nets from a mistyped port name, silent truncation on width mismatches, signed and unsigned mixing, lost carries, unintended latches, incomplete sensitivity lists, blocking assignments in sequential logic, X‑optimism, multiple drivers, missing resets and unsynchronized crossings all compile without an error. Tapeout checks for them on every change, across the RTL, the lint and synthesis reports and the simulation results, so they surface as findings long before the lab.

A pass only counts as evidence if it tested something. Tapeout looks for assertions that pass vacuously because their trigger never happens, covergroups that were never sampled, scoreboards that compared nothing, config_db lookups that silently fell back to defaults, objections that ended a test early and assertions someone disabled while debugging. Results like that are treated as unknown until a real check backs them up.

Tapeout triages them. Real problems get separated from intentional patterns, like deliberate truncation, unused ports on vendor IP or a CDC crossing that’s already safe by design, and each one gets a proposed waiver with its reason and evidence. Your engineers approve the waivers, Ledger keeps them, and if a later change touches the logic behind a waiver, Tapeout reopens it so an old justification never covers new code.

Yes. From SystemRDL or IP‑XACT it checks reset values, access policies, field behaviour and side effects through the RAL model, and flags every place the register map, the reference manual and the RTL disagree.

It works with Portable Stimulus (PSS) scenarios where teams use them, so one test intent can run across simulation, emulation and FPGA prototyping, with every result recorded against the same plan.

SoCs built on AMBA AXI, AHB, APB, ACE and CHI, including cache coherency across CHI requesters and home nodes, and designs with PCIe, CXL, DDR and LPDDR, USB, Ethernet, SPI, I2C, UART and CAN interfaces, working through your protocol checkers and verification IP.

It plans and checks clock trees, PLLs, muxes, dividers, clock gating and clock switching, including glitch‑free switching and behaviour across frequency changes.

Reset sources, reset trees, reset sequencing, reset synchronization and reset status flags, checked against the reference manual and the RTL for every block.

Yes. For clock domain crossing it covers crossings, synchronizers, asynchronous FIFOs and reconvergence. For reset domain crossing it covers reset crossings, reset ordering and in‑flight transactions caught by a reset, with results from your CDC and RDC tools kept on the record.

Yes. Power mode entry and exit, wake‑up sources, retention, isolation and power sequencing, plus DVFS where the chip scales voltage and frequency. It reads your UPF or CPF power intent and runs power‑aware simulation and low‑power verification against it.

Tapeout plans for what happens when a reset, power domain, clock, watchdog, bus or ECC fault hits, and checks how far the failure spreads and whether the rest of the SoC recovers the way the spec says it should.

Yes. X‑initialization checks cover undefined states after reset, memory and ECC initialization and X‑propagation through the design.

Yes. Protection units, TrustZone and firewalls, lifecycle states and debug authentication, including the non‑secure access that should be refused. Hardware security verification covers the CWE hardware weaknesses and information‑flow checks that keys and secrets can’t reach where they shouldn’t. Our how it works walkthrough follows a firewall bug from change to root cause.

Boot sources, the boot ROM, secure boot, fallback paths and multi‑core boot, checked end to end from reset to the first instruction on every core.

The debug access port (DAP), freeze behaviour during debug, trace, and multi‑core and secure debug, including what debug may and may not reach on a locked device.

Reachability from every master to every slave, transaction ordering, QoS, error responses and deadlock, across AXI, AHB, APB and the fabric that ties them together.

Yes. The memory map, coherency, memory attributes, atomics, and RM/RTL consistency, so the reference manual and the RTL agree on every address and register.

Cores, caches and TCM, interrupts and coherency, verified as integrated into the SoC rather than as standalone IP.

ECC, watchdogs, fault detection, error escalation and lockstep cores, plus fault‑injection campaigns that show each safety mechanism catches what it should. It keeps the evidence ISO 26262 automotive and DO‑254 aerospace programs need, from diagnostic coverage to the run behind every result.

Pin muxing and alternate functions (AFs), mux conflicts, reset defaults, and debug and boot pins.

Fuse and OTP loading, shadow registers, ECC on fuse data and feature control driven by fuses.

Yes. Variants that differ in memory, packages, peripherals or device IDs are planned and checked from one record, so a result proven on one variant carries to the others only where it still holds.

Yes. Formal verification, lint, gate‑level simulation (GLS) with SDF timing, and equivalence checking, run with your signoff tools and kept on the record with everything else.

Every requirement traces to its tests, coverage, regression results and waivers, and Ledger shows at any revision what’s closed, what’s open and what a change reopened. That makes tape‑out readiness something you can check on any day of the program. Waivers and signoff stay with your engineers.

It verifies the design‑for‑test logic in simulation, including scan, MBIST, JTAG and IJTAG, and boundary scan, so test access works and stays locked down where security says it should.

Yes. Tapeout runs fully air‑gapped, on your own servers or in your private cloud. A deployment needs no outbound connection to Tapeout Labs.

No. RTL, testbenches, logs, waveforms and results stay on your machines, and our team has no access to a deployment unless you grant it.

No. We don’t train models on customer data.

The ones you approve. A deployment can run open‑weight models on your own hardware, so no prompt or design data reaches an outside model provider.

Yes. The agents run the tools you already license, through your license servers and job schedulers, under accounts and permissions you control.

Yes. Ledger records every action the agents take, with the command, inputs, tool and version, output and the result it supports, on your own systems. Our security page has the details.

Synopsys VCS, Verdi, VC Formal and ZeBu. Cadence Xcelium, JasperGold, Palladium, SimVision, Verisium and vManager. Siemens Questa, OneSpin and Veloce. AMD Vivado, Altera Quartus, Verilator, Yosys, GTKWave, cocotb and UVM, plus any tool that writes a log, a waveform or an exit code.

Yes. Revisions come from your Git, GitHub, GitLab, Subversion (SVN) or Perforce repositories, findings go to Jira and Slack, and your Tcl, Python and Make scripts run as they are.

No. The agents drive your simulators, formal tools and waveform viewers in batch mode and read their outputs directly, so they aren’t slowed down by menus and dialogs your CAD team set up for people. When an engineer wants to look, Tapeout opens the waveform or report at the exact moment that matters.

Yes. You set the coding guidelines, lint rule sets and severities, naming conventions, methodology (UVM, cocotb or your own), signoff criteria and waiver policy, per project or per block, and the agents follow them. It also learns from how your engineers review its findings, which waivers they approve and which suggestions they reject, so it fits a team that writes careful datapath RTL as well as one that lives in integration and glue logic.

Every company’s flow is different, and any new engineer needs time to learn it. Tapeout indexes the design, the scripts, the tool setup and past runs from day one, and Ledger keeps what it learns, so the cold start happens once and the system gets faster at your flow the longer it runs.

On internal benchmarks built from actual regressions and design changes. For the validity kernel, Tapeout commits its classification of every prior result before the new full regression runs, and the full regression then scores it. We track the safe carryforward rate, the unsafe carryforward rate (a result carried forward that should have been rerun, the one that matters most), how often it answers unknown, compute and time saved, and whether its confidence is calibrated. For debugging, we give it historical failures with the answers hidden and score root cause, localization to the right file, line and transaction, time to closure, a validated fix, compute used and evidence reused.

Yes. Evaluations are by invitation and run on your machines, against regressions your team has already closed, so you can compare Tapeout’s findings with what your engineers found. Talk to us to set one up.

Always. The agents investigate, rerun and report, and waivers and signoff stay with your engineers. Every decision records who made it.

Tapeout Labs, Inc., founded in 2026 by engineers with backgrounds at Apple, AMD, Meta, Synopsys and Cadence. Meet the team on About.

Yes. If you want to build the system for autonomous silicon verification, tell us what you’ve built.