Webinar: Should I Kill My Formal Run – Part 2: What You Can Do Beforehand to Avoid Trouble and Set Yourself Up for Success

Webinar: Should I Kill My Formal Run – Part 2: What You Can Do Beforehand to Avoid Trouble and Set Yourself Up for Success
by Daniel Payne on 09-24-2019 at 8:00 am

Overview

In this segment we assume you are about to kick off a formal analysis, and want to make sure you will avoid the most obvious pitfalls in setting up your formal testbench, the DUT, and the runner scripting.

What You Will Learn

  • How you can setup your formal testbench for success by writing assertions, constraints, and cover
… Read More

Webinar: Should I Kill My Formal Run – Part 1: What You Can Do While the Formal Run is In-Progress

Webinar: Should I Kill My Formal Run – Part 1: What You Can Do While the Formal Run is In-Progress
by Daniel Payne on 09-17-2019 at 8:00 am

Overview

Imagine you have a formal job currently running in another window, and you are in a quandary about whether to keep it going or to kill it to save computer resources and time. In this segment we will show you the information you can use to decide whether to continue or stop.

What You Will Learn

  1. How to monitor the formal engines
… Read More
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The Wolper Method

The Wolper Method
by Bernard Murphy on 06-20-2018 at 11:00 am
Categories: Oski Technology, Semiconductor Services

If you read around topics in advanced formal verification you’re likely to run into something called Wolper coloring, or what Vigyan Singhal (Chief Oski at Oski) calls the Wolper method. Many domains have specialized techniques but what’s surprising in this instance is a seeming absence of helpful on-line explanations (though… Read More

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When FPGA Design Looks More Like ASIC Design

When FPGA Design Looks More Like ASIC Design
by Bernard Murphy on 06-08-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: EDA, FPGA, Synopsys

I am sure there are many FPGA designers who are quite content to rely on hardware vendor tools to define, check, implement and burn their FPGAs, and who prefer to test in-system to validate functionality. But that approach is unlikely to work when you’re building on the big SoC platforms – Zynq, Arria and even the big non-SoC devices.… Read More

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Meltdown, Spectre and Formal

Meltdown, Spectre and Formal
by Bernard Murphy on 04-19-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: Oski Technology, Semiconductor Services

Once again Oski delivered in their most recent Decoding Formal session, kicking off with a talk on the infamous Meltdown and Spectre bugs and possible relevance of formal methods in finding these and related problems. So far I haven’t invested much effort in understanding these beyond a hand-waving “cache and speculative execution… Read More

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Formal: Going Deep and Going Early

Formal: Going Deep and Going Early
by Bernard Murphy on 03-20-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: Cadence, EDA

This year I got a chance to talk with Cadence at DVCon on a whole bunch of topics, so expect a steady stream of blogs over the next couple of months. First up was an update from Pete Hardee (Director of Product Management) on, surprise, surprise, formal verification. I’m always trying to learn more about this space, so I picked a couple… Read More

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An Advanced-User View of Applied Formal

An Advanced-User View of Applied Formal
by Bernard Murphy on 03-08-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: Events, Oski Technology, Semiconductor Services

Thanks to my growing involvement in formal (at least in writing about it), I was happy to accept an invite to this year’s Oski DVCon dinner / Formal Leadership Summit. In addition to Oski folks and Brian Bailey (an esteemed colleague at another blog site, to steal a Frank Schirrmeister line), a lively group of formal users attended… Read More

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Concluding Inconclusives

Concluding Inconclusives
by Bernard Murphy on 03-01-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: EDA, Mentor, a Siemens Business

Formal methods are a vital complement to other tools in the verification arsenal, but they’re not without challenges. One of the more daunting is the “inconclusive” result – that case where the tool seems to be telling you that it simply gave up trying to figure out if a particular assertion is true or false. Compounding the problem,… Read More

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Simulation and Formal – Finding the Right Balance

Simulation and Formal – Finding the Right Balance
by Bernard Murphy on 01-23-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: ARM, Cadence, EDA

Simulation dominates hardware functional verification today and likely will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile formal verification, once thought to be a possible challenger for the title, has instead converged on a more effective role as a complement to simulation. Formal excels at finding problems… Read More

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System Level Formal

System Level Formal
by Bernard Murphy on 01-09-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: EDA, Oski Technology
3 Comments

Two recently announced vulnerabilities in major processor platforms should remind us that bugs don’t organize themselves to appear only in domains we know how to test comprehensively. Both Meltdown and Spectre (the announced problems) are potential hardware system-level issues allowed by interactions between speculative… Read More