IC design: A short primer on the formal methods-based verification
by Ashish Darbari, Axiomise
It’s no secret that hardware is the new currency in the chip world. It’s no longer the case that the semiconductor industry is in the hands of traditional semiconductor giants; an increasing number of software companies now have their own dedicated hardware development teams. With the advent of open-source architectures, developing silicon with open-source framework and tools is slowly becoming mainstream.
However, while designing has become easier, verification has not.
The 2020 Wilson Research Group study on functional verification points out that 83% of the FPGA and 68% of the ASIC designs fail in the first attempt. Also worth noting is that 68% of the ASIC projects run behind schedule.
The survey reports that for processor development, the ratio of verification to design engineers is 5:1. Imagine having to hire five times more verification resources than design and having to respin the chip.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Process/Voltage/Temperature Sensor with Self-calibration (Supply voltage 1.2V) - TSMC 3nm N3P
- USB 20Gbps Device Controller
- SM4 Cipher Engine
- Ultra-High-Speed Time-Interleaved 7-bit 64GSPS ADC on 3nm
- Fault Tolerant DDR2/DDR3/DDR4 Memory controller
Related White Papers
- A short primer on instruction set architecture
- It's Just a Jump to the Left, Right? Shift Left in IC Design Enablement
- A Survey on SoC Security Verification Methods at the Pre-silicon Stage
- A Survey on the Design, Detection, and Prevention of Pre-Silicon Hardware Trojans
Latest White Papers
- Fault Injection in On-Chip Interconnects: A Comparative Study of Wishbone, AXI-Lite, and AXI
- eFPGA – Hidden Engine of Tomorrow’s High-Frequency Trading Systems
- aTENNuate: Optimized Real-time Speech Enhancement with Deep SSMs on RawAudio
- Combating the Memory Walls: Optimization Pathways for Long-Context Agentic LLM Inference
- Hardware Acceleration of Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) in Large-Scale Systems