Assertion Synthesis: Atrenta, Cadence and AMD Tell All

Assertion Synthesis is a new tool for verification and design engineers that can be used with simulation or emulation. At DVCon Yuan Lu of Atrenta is presenting a tutorial on Atrenta’s BugScope along with John Henri Jr of Cadence explaining how it helps emulation and Baosheng Wang of AMD discussing their experiences of the product.

Creating an adequate number of high quality assertions and coverage properties is a challenge in any verification plan. Assertion Synthesis takes as input the RTL description of the design and its test environment and automatically generates high quality whitebox assertions and coverage properties in standard language formats such as SVA, PSL and Verilog. Assertion Synthesis enables an automated assertion-based verification methodology that improves design quality and reduces verification overhead.

Here’s the 5000ft version of what Assertion Synthesis is. BugScope watches the simulation (or emulation, which I think of as a special sort of simulation) of the design and observes its behavior. Based on what it sees, BugScope automatically generates syntactically correct assertions about the design, behaviors that it believes are always true based on the simulation.

The designer and verification engineers can use these assertions in three different ways:

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