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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

March - 2011 - issue > Technology

Formal Verification Fulfilling Its Promise for IC Designers

Rajeev Ranjan
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Rajeev Ranjan
Formal verification for IC design has a long and interesting history spanning several decades. For many years it was seen more as a research project for academics than a real design and verification tool, but that began to change over the last decade as viable products began to appear on the market in the early to mid-2000s.

During this period there was initial reluctance to embrace formal technologies, often thought too challenging and complex for everyday use, but those notions are quickly changing with innovations to create a “user-friendly” formal tool. Once relegated to experts with very specialized knowledge, over time the complex aspects of formal technology have been pushed under the hood, opening it up to a broader audience. Over the past five years, formal verification was deployed first by experts in the verification team, then by the entire verification team, and lately it is being adopted by the designers themselves.

To put matters in context, semiconductor process technology is rapidly advancing as leading companies and foundries announce plans to move production to 20nm, opening vast new areas of silicon real estate that will populated with hundreds of millions of gates. As a result, the system-on-a-chip (SoC) will become mainstream, requiring IC designers to adapt from hand-crafting chips, to assembling them from individual blocks of intellectual property (IP). Formal verification is well-positioned in this changing environment to have an enormous impact on how SoC designs are created and verified.

Traditional verification methods, such as emulation which uses specialized and expensive hardware to mimic the behavior of a chip, or simulation to model behaviors, can be both time consuming and often unable to detect all errors, or “bugs,” in a chip. It is not at all uncommon for the verification of today’s large, complex ICs to consume weeks or even months of design time – estimated to be as much as 70 percent of the total – before they are ready to be manufactured.

Which brings us to formal verification. It is unique in its ability to fully prove that the design will perform as expected in a just fraction of the time required by other methods. Formal does this by ensuring the correctness of a design using advanced mathematical techniques, specifying design requirements that allow proving the correctness of the design with respect to the specification.


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