Changes In Formal Verification


For the better part of two decades, formal verification was considered too difficult to use in many designs and too slow for anything but narrow bug hunting. Much has changed recently. Ashish Darbari, CEO of Axiomise, explains why formal is now essential for finding deadlocks, security holes, and Xprop issues in mission-critical, safety-critical, and AI designs, and how that will apply to chipl... » read more

Formal Verification Best Practices: Investigating A Deadlock


To ensure a design is deadlock free with formal verification, one approach consists in verifying that it is “always eventually” able to respond to a request. The wording is important. Regardless of the current state and the number of cycles we must wait, in the future the design must respond. This translates very nicely using a type of SystemVerilog Assertion called “liveness propertie... » read more

Optimizing AI Systems


Inserting AI and machine learning into chips adds a whole new dimension of complexity, and creates a variety of potential problems, including deadlocks, loss of performance, and difficulty in achieving closure on many fronts. Gajinder Panesar, fellow at Siemens EDA, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about what’s changed and how to optimize these new devices and systems by monitoring them f... » read more

Shhhhh… Deadlocks Anonymous In Session


I am sure there is an anonymous group – like Alcoholics Anonymous – headquartered in Silicon Valley, meeting every quarter to discuss the deadlocks that have paralyzed their products, roadmap and deployments. In discreet venues in every town, small groups of engineers huddle together to share war stories about the disgruntled customers whose trust was lost because of a deadlock discovered o... » read more

Dealing With Deadlocks


Deadlocks are becoming increasingly problematic as designs becoming more complex and heterogeneous. Rather than just integrating IP, the challenge is understanding all of the possible interactions and dependencies. That affects the choice of IP, how it is implemented in a design, and how it is verified. And it adds a whole bunch of unknowns into an already complex formula for return on inves... » read more