Executive Briefing: Formal Attire


Kathryn Kranen, CEO of Jasper Design Automation, talks with Low Power-High-Performance Engineering about formal verification, where the pain points are in SoC design, and why there is still life left in Moore's Law. [youtube vid=x4jlo6_RRqw] » read more

Shifts In Verification


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Verifying an SoC requires a holistic view of the system, and engineering teams use a number of tools to reach a high degree of confidence in the coverage. But how and when to use those tools is in flux as engineering teams wrestle with increasing complexity at every level of the design, and a skyrocketing increase in the challenge of verifying it. There are no ... » read more

Is This The Era Of Automatic Formal Checks For Verification?


I was thinking about the above question and recalled something IBM would repeat annually back in the late 1980s about its OS/2 replacement for MS-DOS. “This is the year of OS/2!” they would shout. But the marketplace wasn’t listening. As one buddy of mine liked to say, it was only half of an operating system (O.S./2). In the last nine months, my company, Real Intent, along with our com... » read more

PSL/SVA Assertions In SPICE


Assertion-based verification is a key aspect of any complete SoC or Silicon Realization flow. In this paper, we discuss how PSL (Property Specification Language)/SVA (System-V erilog Assertions) assertion semantics are extended for the first time to SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis)-level netlists and evaluated within a SPICE simulator, and present multiple examples an... » read more

Getting Formal With Power


By Ed Sperling Formal methodologies have always been an important tool in the verification engineer’s toolbox because they often can pinpoint bugs faster and with more accuracy than other verification approaches. The problem is that most engineers don’t know how to use them, and understanding this technology to a proficiency level requires a learning curve that most engineers consider pain... » read more

Understanding Formal Verification Concepts, Part 3


This final white paper in a three-part series about formal verification concepts examines the assertion-based verification flow and some of the formal verification algorithms. To download the first two papers in this series, click here for part one and here for part two. This kind of approach has become necessary as SoC designs become more challenging and the traditional method of simulat... » read more

Understanding Formal Verification Concepts, Part II


In this second white paper in a three-part series about formal verification concepts, we examine the assertion-based verification flow and some of the formal verification algorithms. This kind of approach has become necessary as SoC designs become more challenging and as the traditional method of simulation proves too slow, too costly, and insufficient in terms of coverage. To downoload thi... » read more

Understanding Formal Verification Concepts


In today’s complex system on chip (SoC) designs, verification has become a real challenge. Register transfer level (RTL) and gate-level simulations are effectively used for verifying the functional correctness of any design. However, as designs are growing in size as well as functionality, more and more test vectors need to be created and run to get reasonable test coverage. In addition to th... » read more

Why So Formal?


By Bhanu Kapoor Let’s take a look at the types of power management verification issues that are most suited for formal verification and how formal techniques complement dynamic simulation-based verification in some of the challenging tasks associated with validating SoC power management architectures. There are three main categories of formal tools in use today: Equivalence Checkers, Asse... » read more

Formal Verification 101


By Clive "Max" Maxfield The first time I came into contact with the concepts of a digital hardware description language (HDL) and digital logic simulation, I inherently understood how it all "worked." The idea that the statements in the modeling language acted in a concurrent manner just seemed to make sense. By comparison, trying to wrap my brain around formal verification has always mad... » read more

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