Cadence Design Systems > Case Studies > Ricoh Accelerates Development Cycle for Multifunction Printer ASICs with Cadence

Ricoh Accelerates Development Cycle for Multifunction Printer ASICs with Cadence

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Data Mining
Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)

Applicable Industries

Equipment & Machinery
Mining

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Inventory Management
Time Sensitive Networking

Services

Testing & Certification

About The Customer

Ricoh is a leading provider of office equipment, including multi-function printers, fax machines, and related supplies and services. The company caters to the data center, in-plant, print-for-pay, and commercial print markets, offering a range of mono and color production printing systems. All of these systems contain multifunction ASICs to control the device. Ricoh was seeking to accelerate the development cycle for these multifunction printer ASICs to keep up with the rapidly evolving market for these products.

The Challenge

Ricoh, a leading provider of office equipment, was facing challenges in speeding up the development cycle for its multifunction printer ASICs to keep pace with the fast-moving market. The company identified two significant areas for improvement. Firstly, there was a lack of effective solutions to avoid missing test cases and test implementations, leading to errors in the testing process. About 22% of their errors stemmed from insufficient data extraction into the testbench and wrong test implementation due to misinterpretation of the specification. Secondly, Ricoh was spending too much time, about three hours each day, just capturing the verification status for progress management manually from a team of 26 verification engineers. This excluded time spent diagnosing actual problems. Ricoh needed to automate this data collection and filtering process, so the engineers could start resolving problems sooner.

The Solution

To streamline its testing and verification management processes, Ricoh implemented a new method and automation tool for verification planning and management, Cadence Incisive vManager solution. This solution addressed the linking of design specifications to the test environment and automation for data collection and reporting. Ricoh also implemented Cadence’s metric-driven verification (MDV) methodology, designed to enhance verification quality, increase schedule predictability, and improve team productivity. With this methodology and the simulation tool, Ricoh verification engineers could use specifications to create verification plans, measure their progress, and determine when they’ve achieved high-quality verification closure. Using vPlanner™, the planning tool within the Incisive vManager tool, Ricoh was able to link between the design specification and test specification to reduce the occurrence of insufficient data extraction into the testbench.

Operational Impact

The implementation of the Incisive vManager and MDV solution led to significant operational improvements for Ricoh. The company found that distinguishing items between use cases and functional tests made reviews much easier. Use case test items were checked to see if test cases and assertions in question were sufficient. Function tests were checked to reveal coverage which showed whether variables in question had sufficient variations/range. The engineers also discovered many re-usability and change management aspects of the vPlanner tool. The automation of its data collection and push-button reporting process saved about 350 work hours. With automated data collection and reporting, Ricoh can now start actual issue-solving much earlier.

Quantitative Benefit

vManager solution addresses approximately 22% of the missing or incomplete test case issues
2.5 months saved in data collection and reporting time
Ability to start resolving issues earlier in the design cycle