How To Optimize Silicon Utilization To Improve PPA


In the semiconductor industry, optimizing Power, Performance, and Area (PPA) is a key challenge for designers and architects. Balancing these three factors often involves making trade-offs. Improving one variable might lead to sacrificing others. For example, boosting performance may result in increased power consumption and a larger silicon area, or some power-reducing techniques might reduce ... » read more

New Ways To Improve EDA Productivity


EDA vendors are taking aim at new ways to improve the productivity of design and verification engineers, who are struggling to keep pace with exponential increases in chip complexity in tight time-to-market windows and with constrained engineering talent pipelines. In the past, progress often was as straightforward as improving algorithms or parallelizing computations in a linear flow. But w... » read more

Easier Assertion Development And Debug With Simulation Replay


By Vin Liao and Robert Ruiz Assertions and assertion IP (AIP) are a core part of the register transfer level (RTL) verification environment for all modern chip development projects. Assertions can be considered as statements of design intent, specifying how the design should behave—and not behave—under specified conditions. They range from simple statements, for example, that a multi-bit... » read more

Scenario Coverage In Formal Verification


A rapid increase in complexity with heterogeneous assemblies and advanced-node chips is raising all sorts of questions on the formal verification side about the completeness of coverage. Engineers may assume proofs are complete, but in many cases they're black boxes that provide little or no insights into what's actually being proven. This is where scenario coverage comes into play. Ashish Darb... » read more

Benchmark and Evaluation Framework For Characterizing LLM Performance In Formal Verification (UC Berkeley, Nvidia)


A new technical paper titled "FVEval: Understanding Language Model Capabilities in Formal Verification of Digital Hardware" was published by researchers at UC Berkeley and NVIDIA. Abstract "The remarkable reasoning and code generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have spurred significant interest in applying LLMs to enable task automation in digital chip design. In particula... » read more

Metamodeling Techniques for Formal Verification


A new technical paper titled "Verifying Non-friendly Formal Verification Designs: Can We Start Earlier?" was published by researchers at Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau and Infineon Technologies. Published in DVCon Europe 2024. Abstract "The design of Systems on Chips (SoCs) is becoming more and more complex due to technological advancements. Missed bugs can cause drastic failures in saf... » read more

Corner-Case Bug Hunting for RISC-V


By Ashish Darbari and Ia Tsomaia RISC-V continues to make headlines worldwide, but verification continues to be challenging. The findings of the Wilson Research Report, 2022 (see figure 1) make the trends in verification clear. We presented these in a keynote talk titled, "Future is Formal," at the recent DVCon India event. One thing is quite apparent: whether you are using directed tests... » read more

Formal Verification Of A Mixed Signal IP with Both Digital And Analog Blocks


A new technical paper titled "Analogous Alignments: Digital "Formally" meets Analog" was published by researchers at Infineon Technologies. Abstract: "The complexity of modern-day System-on-Chips (SoCs) is continually increasing, and it becomes increasingly challenging to deliver dependable and credible chips in a short time-to-market. Especially, in the case of test chips, where the aim is... » read more

Hardware-Side-Channel Leakage Contracts That Account For Glitches and Transitions (TU Graz)


A new technical paper titled "Closing the Gap: Leakage Contracts for Processors with Transitions and Glitches" was published by researchers at Graz University of Technology. Abstract "Security verification of masked software implementations of cryptographic algorithms must account for microarchitectural side-effects of CPUs. Leakage contracts were proposed to provide a formal separation bet... » read more

Formal Verification of Security Properties On RTL Designs


A technical paper titled “RTL Verification for Secure Speculation Using Contract Shadow Logic” was published by researchers at Princeton University, MIT CSAIL, and EPFL. Abstract: "Modern out-of-order processors face speculative execution attacks. Despite various proposed software and hardware mitigations to prevent such attacks, new attacks keep arising from unknown vulnerabilities. Thus... » read more

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