1. Purpose and scope
Qualification turns the impressions of the pilot into evidence. The pilot showed what a tool can do; qualification establishes what this exact tool, with this exact model and these exact settings, does on the full reference design set, how consistently it does it, and how it behaves when it is wrong. The decision to rely on the step in a controlled flow should rest on that evidence and on nothing else.
The stage has a close parallel in design verification. Where verification proves a design against its specification with coverage goals, qualification proves a tool against reference designs with success criteria. The difference is emphasis: qualification must catalogue how the tool fails as carefully as how often it succeeds, because a step that is usually right but occasionally and silently wrong can be more dangerous than one that is often visibly wrong. Each failure mode needs a detection method, and the confidence the organisation needs in the tool depends on whether those methods are independent of the tool itself.
In scope: locking versions, running the full reference set, measuring accuracy and repeatability, probing failure modes, defining the independent check for each, documenting the model and its data, assessing tool confidence and stating the qualified scope. Out of scope: production data, IP and licence terms, integration into the controlled flow and the human review policy, though qualification provides the evidence each of them depends on.
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