Who uses Photoniq
Built for teams who can't afford coverage escapes.
ASIC/SoC design teams under tape-out pressure. AI chip startups with compressed timelines and smaller DV teams. Tape-out services that verify client RTL under contract. Coverage escapes in all three contexts mean the same thing: respins, schedule slips, and cost overruns that follow the chip into production.
Problem
ASIC/SoC design teams
You're four weeks from tape-out signoff. Coverage has been stuck at 87% for twelve days. The remaining 13% lives in edge-case FSM transitions, multi-cycle memory bus protocol sequences, and error-recovery paths your constrained-random environment hasn't found. Writing directed tests for all of it would take three verification engineers another three weeks.
Solution
Photoniq reads your current UCDB and identifies which specific uncovered bins are highest priority. It generates ranked test scenarios for exactly those bins — scenarios you can implement, run against your existing testbench, and verify closed within the same day. Teams report closing the final coverage gap segment in 2–3 days rather than 2–3 weeks.
The output is a structured manifest your verification team can work from directly, integrated into the same version-controlled flow as your existing test suite. Nothing to unlearn, no new simulation infrastructure.
Start Explore tier freeProblem
AI chip startups
You're building a custom accelerator with a DV team of two or three engineers. Your RTL has custom datapath, novel memory subsystem architecture, and non-standard ISA extensions — none of which existing verification IP covers out of the box. You have 14 weeks until tape-out and no budget for six months of directed-test writing.
Solution
Photoniq's coverage predictions let a small DV team cover what would otherwise require eight engineers. The model has seen custom datapath RTL patterns before — it knows which corner cases tend to hide in novel microarchitectures. Your two verification engineers spend their time implementing ranked recommendations rather than reading RTL and guessing at stimulus.
Coverage confidence is documented in the phnq-manifest.json — useful for investor technical diligence and for internal tape-out sign-off criteria when you need evidence of systematic coverage closure, not just a percentage.
See Team tier pricingTeam coverage comparison
Illustrative. Actual results depend on RTL complexity and team experience.
Problem
Tape-out services and design houses
Design services companies verify client RTL under contract. Coverage closure is a deliverable — but the client's RTL is unfamiliar each time, and building directed tests from scratch for each new architecture is expensive to staff. Clients increasingly ask for documented coverage closure evidence, not just a final percentage, because tape-out post-mortems routinely trace escapes to verification gaps in the last 10–15% of functional coverage.
Solution
Photoniq provides design houses with a systematic, auditable coverage closure process. When you receive client RTL and their existing simulation results, you run Photoniq against the UCDB and receive a prioritized gap list within minutes. The manifest doubles as a coverage audit trail — you can deliver it to the client alongside your verification report.
Contact us about Studio tier pricing for multi-project environments.
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