The measurement of a functional verification environment's ability to detect potential design bugs by injecting functional faults into the device under verification and evaluating whether the functional verification environment can indicate erroneous behavior of the device.

The term functional qualification was introduced by Certess. The technology used to perform functional qualification is derived from mutation analysis. Functional qualification measures the quality of functional verification, functional verification describes the functional testing activity in the development of integrated circuits.

-- Mark Hampton - 12 Jun 2007