There is an interview in the San Jose Mercury News with Kathryn Kranen, Jasper’s CEO. Of course the Mercury is a general newspaper and can’t expect most of its readership to have a clue what EDA is, never mind formal verification. It’s a similar problem to the one we all have when we try and explain to our families just what we do. Steve Johnson does his best to understand.
Q: Say a company designs a new chip for an automobile. How would your formal-verification software prevent the design from having a glitch that blows a car fuse, for example?
A: What we do is all mathematical. We can just say there is a rule, or it’s called a property, that this fuse should not blow. And then the software will automatically reverse engineer what conditions could cause that to fail. It tells you if you were driving in reverse while you moved your seat and shifted into park, the fuse will blow. It’s very reliable. It solves problems about connections inside the chip.
I knew that Kathryn and her husband Kevin both had initial “K”. I didn’t know their kids did. I think sending lots of mail to “K. Kranen” could cause some fun.
The article is here.
Application-Specific Lithography: Sense Amplifier and Sub-Wordline Driver Metal Patterning in DRAM