Regression operations
Nightly and weekly regression execution and monitoring, seed management, first-pass failure triage and binning, regression-health reporting, coverage merge and report generation.
Nearshore SystemVerilog & UVM services
Design verification capacity on your working day
A dedicated nearshore pod that builds and runs UVM testbenches — regression operations, sequence development, coverage closure — from Guatemala City, on US Central time, inside your environment and under your licences.
- Discipline
- Functional verification — SystemVerilog and UVM. Nothing else.
- Location
- Guatemala City, Guatemala
- Time zone
- UTC−6 year-round, no daylight saving
- Engagement model
- Committed FTE capacity inside your environment
- Operating since
- 1997, as an outsourced delivery company
Why this exists
Verification is where chip schedules go
Functional verification has consumed roughly 70% of IC and ASIC project effort since 2008. The constraint is not tools — it is engineers who can build and maintain UVM testbenches.
Adding a design engineer does not accelerate a project whose critical path is coverage closure. And when a programme falls behind on regression triage or coverage, the fastest available fix is usually to move an experienced engineer onto routine work — the most expensive hour in the building spent on the least differentiated task.
~70%
of IC and ASIC project effort goes to functional verification
Wilson Research Group / Siemens EDA
14%
of projects achieved first-silicon success in 2024 — the lowest in two decades
Wilson Research Group, 2024
75%
of projects run behind schedule, against a historical 66%
Wilson Research Group, 2024
1M+
additional skilled semiconductor workers needed by 2030
Deloitte
What we do
Functional verification. Only that.
We build and operate UVM testbenches. We do not design chips, and we are deliberately narrow — because a small team that claims nine disciplines has none of them.
Sequence development
Directed and constrained-random sequences and sequence libraries against defined coverage gaps, layered and virtual sequences, constraint debug and solver-performance tuning.
Functional coverage closure
Covergroups, coverpoints and crosses built from an approved vPlan, systematic gap analysis, grinding assigned bins to closure, exclusion justification and documentation.
Testbench maintenance and uplift
Extending existing UVM environments for new configurations and derivatives, OVM and VMM migration, UVM 1.1 → 1.2 → IEEE 1800.2 uplift, deprecation cleanup, simulator-portability fixes.
UVM component development
Agent construction — driver, sequencer, monitor — plus scoreboards, reference models and predictors, configuration objects and the config DB, factory overrides, UVC packaging for reuse.
Register layer and assertions
UVM register model generation from IP-XACT or RDL, adapter and predictor integration, register sequences and map maintenance. SVA protocol and connectivity checkers on targeted blocks.
What we do not do
- RTL design and micro-architecture — we verify designs, we do not author them
- Synthesis, physical implementation, timing closure, or any back-end flow
- Analog and mixed-signal verification. DFT insertion, ATPG and test-pattern work
- Post-silicon validation, bring-up and lab work. Firmware and embedded software
- Standalone formal sign-off — we scope SVA inside simulation-based UVM environments
Our engineers
Trained on the tools they will actually use
Guatemala’s first cohort of IC design and verification engineers completed a 320-hour academy in 2026 — digital design fundamentals, circuit verification in Verilog, SystemVerilog and UVM, and the RTL-to-layout flow on commercial EDA tools.
Verification was the largest single block of that syllabus. We recruit from that class and the cohorts behind it, and 14 Degrees is the employer — our engineers are on our payroll, under our confidentiality and IP terms.
They work flexible, staggered schedules so they can continue postgraduate study and research alongside the work. One consequence we state plainly: we quote capacity in full-time equivalents, not headcount. You contract for hours of committed capacity, never a team that sounds larger than it is.
How we work
Inside your environment, under your governance
The model is built so that nothing of value leaves your control, and so that starting with us costs you very little if it does not work out.
| Control | How it works |
|---|---|
| Access model | Work performed entirely inside your environment — your VPN, your servers, your simulator licences. No client RTL, testbench source or design data resides on our infrastructure. |
| Tooling | We adopt your flow, conventions, version control and CI. We do not import our own. |
| Named engineers | Individually background-checked and bound by confidentiality. No rotation on or off your account without prior notice. You may interview and decline any engineer proposed, at any point, for any reason. |
| Segregation | Engineers on your account are not staffed on any engagement for a named competitor, for the duration and for a defined period after. |
| Intellectual property | All work product — testbenches, sequences, covergroups, assertions, scripts — assigned to you on creation. No retained rights, no cross-account reuse, no portfolio claims. |
| Academic boundary | Several of our engineers continue postgraduate research. Client work is contractually walled off from it: nothing performed on your project may be published, presented, cited or used in a thesis. |
| Reporting | Weekly written reporting from week one against metrics agreed before commencement — coverage progression versus plan, regression pass rate and stability, triage turnaround, bug discovery rate, and escaped-issue tracking. |
| Commercial terms | No bench charges. You pay for allocated, productive capacity. Quality metrics agreed in writing before the first billable hour. |
Why Guatemala
Same working day, no handoff penalty
Verification is a debug discipline. A failing regression seed, an ambiguous specification clause, a scoreboard mismatch that turns out to be a checker bug — each resolves in twenty minutes on a call and three days over an email chain.
| Site | Working day | Overlap |
|---|---|---|
| 14 Degrees, Guatemala City08:00–18:00 local | — | |
| Austin, TX09:00–18:00 CDT | 9 h | |
| Sunnyvale / San Jose, CA09:00–18:00 PDT | 8 h | |
| Hillsboro, OR09:00–18:00 PDT | 8 h | |
| Boston, MA09:00–18:00 EDT | 8 h | |
| Bengaluru, India09:00–18:00 IST | 0 h |
No export-control friction
Guatemala carries no US export-control restriction for this category of work. All personnel are screened, with nationality and residency disclosed at staffing.
CAFTA-DR framework
An established US–Guatemala trade and services framework, with fifteen free trade agreements covering more than forty countries.
Western Hemisphere diversification
For an engineering footprint concentrated in geographies carrying geopolitical or export-control exposure, a Central American node is a de-risking move on its own terms.
Who we are
A delivery company moving into one engineering discipline
14 Degrees has run outsourced operations from Guatemala since 1997. The operational layer that new suppliers usually fail on is already built and auditable.
Recruitment at volume, retention and workforce management, English-language client-facing operations, access-controlled facilities with network segregation, SLA reporting and audit response, tested business continuity — these are not aspirations for us; they are how the business already runs.
Design verification is new, and we are building it deliberately: one discipline, a small team, senior practitioners hired in to lead rather than promoted from the floor, and certification before billable work. We would rather be evaluated on a narrow claim we can demonstrate than a broad one we cannot.
Common questions
What buyers ask us first
01What does 14 Degrees do in design verification?
We build and operate UVM testbenches. The work covers regression operations, sequence development, functional coverage closure, testbench maintenance and uplift, UVM component development, and register-layer and assertion work, all in SystemVerilog and UVM.
02Do you design chips?
No. We verify designs, we do not author them. RTL design and micro-architecture, synthesis, physical implementation, timing closure, analog and mixed-signal verification, DFT, post-silicon validation and firmware are all outside our scope.
03Where does the work happen, and whose tools are used?
Entirely inside your environment — your VPN, your servers, your simulator licences. No client RTL, testbench source or design data resides on our infrastructure. We adopt your flow, conventions, version control and CI rather than importing our own.
04What time zone do you work in?
Guatemala is UTC−6 all year and does not observe daylight saving. That gives a full working day of overlap with Austin and about eight hours with Sunnyvale, Hillsboro and Boston, and the overlap does not shift twice a year.
05Are your verification engineers certified?
Every engineer we contract for verification work completes a formal, examination-based certification in design verification, at our cost, before billable work begins. The path covers SystemVerilog testbench construction, SystemVerilog Assertions and UVM-based verification environments, with a separate examination in each.
06Who owns the work product?
You do. Testbenches, sequences, covergroups, assertions and scripts are assigned to you on creation. There are no retained rights, no cross-account reuse and no portfolio claims.
07How does an engagement start?
With one scoped workstream — a coverage-closure assignment, a regression-operations handover, or sequence development against a defined gap — with quality metrics agreed in writing before the first billable hour.
Get in touch
Start with something small enough to be a test
The right first step is usually one scoped workstream — a coverage-closure assignment, a regression-operations handover, sequence development against a defined gap — with quality metrics agreed in writing beforehand. Tell us what is behind schedule and we will tell you honestly whether we can help.
Industry figures cited are drawn from published Wilson Research Group / Siemens EDA functional verification trend reports and Deloitte semiconductor workforce research. SystemVerilog and UVM are open standards maintained by IEEE and Accellera. All other product and company names referenced are the property of their respective owners; their mention describes the tools and standards our engineers work with and does not imply any affiliation, partnership or endorsement.