Intelligent verification is a software process that allows engineers and technicians to use computers to ensure that a hardware design will perform as expected once the device has been fabricated or built. The term applies especially to the design and manufacture of integrated circuits (ICs), also called chips. Until about the year 2000, engineers and technicians could verify the functionality of an IC design by testing all possible scenarios individually, a process called manual verification. As ICs grew more complex, manual verification became unworkable because the vast number of possible conditions, called coverage points, grew too large. The impracticality of manual verification gave rise to the notion of intelligent verification. Programs for intelligent verification remain in the conceptual and early development phases. The ideal intelligent-verification software will classify events within a subject IC according to relative importance, automatically tackling the most serious problems first. The debugging process will not rely on trial-and-error or "brute-force" methods but instead will strategically identify, track down, and resolve existing design flaws. Time and resources will be saved by minimizing or eliminating tests for previously resolved flaws