1. Purpose of the gate
Design validation answers whether the frozen design meets its requirements. Not whether it works on the bench, which integration showed, but whether it meets every requirement, across the operating conditions, over its expected life, with the software that will ship. It is the evidence the product needs before certification and qualification, and it is the last point at which a design problem can be fixed before production tooling and certification lock the design further.
The validation units are built close to production, so their results describe what customers will receive. Tests cover function, performance, power, thermal, environment, reliability, software and security, and pre-compliance checks show whether formal certification is likely to pass. Every requirement must trace to a passed test or an approved exception, and no high-severity defect may remain open without an approved waiver.
The criteria are: every requirement traced to a passed test or an approved exception; environmental and reliability tests passed to the agreed plan; pre-compliance results with no known blockers for certification; and no open high-severity defects without an approved waiver. Gating work products are the requirements traceability matrix, the environmental and mechanical test results, the software release candidate, the DVT report and the security test report, all final. Beside them come the signal and power integrity validation report, the reliability test results, the pre-compliance test results, the certification test plan, the validated firmware images and a first service and support guide, all on the DVT prototypes built from the frozen design and brought up by the integration team.
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