This may be true in some cases, but from my experience (nearly 20 years in custom IC design) good design is still more difficult than verification. Verification

This may be true in some cases, but from my experience (nearly 20 years in custom IC design) good design is still more difficult than verification. Verification seems to have an element of over complication. I've seen simple, totally independent sub components take many man weeks of verification, not because it needed to, but because the verification approach, even for simple things can be overly complex. So sometimes the reason verification can take more resources is not because its harder, its because the approach for that particular problem was not efficient. Of course like anything there are extremes on bot sides - but good design must be both correct, efficient, and meet timing/power goals, while verification must just be correct.