1. Purpose of the gate
Flow integration complete confirms that the step, as qualified and as approved for data and terms, has become a controlled part of the design flow rather than a tool engineers run on the side. A qualified tool used outside the flow loses most of its value: nobody can tell later which results it produced, which version produced them, or whether the checks around it ran.
The gate criteria are an integration regression passing on the reference design set; provenance logging that records tool, model and settings versions for every AI-assisted result; access controls configured and checked by information security; and a tested fallback path. The marker Flow step frozen is reached here: tool, model and settings versions are locked in the controlled flow, and any change goes through requalification.
The integration regression matters because integration can change behaviour. Scripted inputs, data preparation, environment differences and wrappers can all alter what the tool produces compared with qualification. A passing integration regression on the reference set shows that the integrated step still behaves as the qualified one did.
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