1. Purpose and scope
This stage turns the early access drop into feature complete design code. It finishes the features and configuration options left out of the early drop, completes the configuration and interface logic an integrator connects to, and drives lint and clock domain crossing checks to clean or reviewed waivers in every supported configuration. It runs from the early access release to the IP RTL freeze, which places the design at the Beta step of the IP maturity scale: feature complete, with verification and views closing.
The freeze protects everyone downstream. Coverage measured on changing code has to be measured again, and test insertion and views built on changing code have to be redone. This stage is where the team earns a freeze that holds: the testbench grows alongside the code so bugs are found before the freeze, trial synthesis covers every configuration, and integrator findings from the early drop are answered.
The stage covers soft blocks delivered as design code. Hardening a block into a laid out macro is not part of it; where a supplier offers a reference hardening on a target process, that work follows in IP DFT & Implementation Views and is labelled as a reference.
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