Avery Design Realizes Insight For Formal Bug Hunting and Coverage Closure

– Avery Design Systems today announced Insight, a new breed of formal analysis tool that delivers a deterministic bug hunting and coverage closure process with unprecedented flexibility and complements today’s SystemVerilog-based intelligent testbench methodologies.

“Formal analysis can be made significantly more productive by breaking the RTL synthesis barrier and tapping into the key information about design intent and environment which is captured in today’s intelligent testbench methodologies”, said Chilai Huang, president of Avery Design Systems. “Unlike conventional formal analysis tools that run orthogonal to simulation-based methods, Insight complements simulation making it more broadly within reach of designers and verification engineers alike.”

Insight performs formal analysis to hunt down deep, corner-case bugs in designs and improve functional coverage resulting in shortened functional verification cycles and higher design quality. Insight can be used at numerous phases of design implementation. For example in processor verification, Insight can be used for sequential bug hunting by comparing instruction set simulator (ISS) and RTL pipeline implementations as well as at later stages when optimized RTL pipeline implementations are available. Insight is based on the industry’s first mixed logic and symbolic simulation engine, called Fusion, that works in conjunction with several formal satisfiability (SAT) and word-level algebraic solver engines.

Insight's algebraic solver utilizes current multi-core platforms to break a problem into several sub-problems to be solved in parallel. In bug hunting mode, Insight targets an intelligent testbench’s assertions and scoreboard checkers (reference model based or ad hoc) to find sequential non-compliance and then generates transaction-level counterexamples which are replayed through the existing testbench. In coverage closure mode, Insight targets coverage monitor points that are missed using constrained random verification (CRV) methods and deterministically generates transaction-level directed Page 2 of 3 tests. Existing intelligent testbenches are easily extended for use with Insight’s symbolic verification. Insight automatically generates directed tests that can be added to existing simulation regression suites.

Insight delivers other benefits beyond conventional approaches including:

1. bug hunting and coverage closure is deterministic and requires significantly fewer verification cycles over CRV approaches

2. less setup time required and more reliable results achieved by leveraging an intelligent testbench that is already hardened first in simulation before it is used in formal analysis

3. fewer new assertions and constraints need to be added to the intelligent testbench to run comprehensive formal analysis compared to other formal tool approaches

Avery Design will be hosting demonstrations of Insight and its full line of products including Verification IP (VIP) and distributed parallel simulation in booth #355 at the 45th annual Design Automation Conference taking place in the Anaheim Convention Center from June 8-13, 2008. To register for demonstration slots, please email dac_demo@avery-design.com.

Avery Design has made a white paper on Insight available entitled, “Applying Symbolic Bug Hunting and Coverage Closure Methods to Processor Verification”. To receive an electronic copy, please email insight@avery-design.com.

Pricing and Availability
Insight will be available for beta release with support for Verilog, SystemVerilog in June 2008. Commercial release and price information is planned for release in Q4’08.

About Avery Design Systems
Founded in 1999, Avery Design Systems, Inc. enables system and SOC design teams to achieve dramatic functional verification productivity improvements through the use of formal bug hunting and coverage closure, robust core-through-chip-level Verification IP for PCI Express and SATA standards, and scalable distributed parallel logic simulation. The company delivers software products to leading edge semiconductor and systems companies worldwide.
Avery Design Systems is privately held. The company is a member of the Cadence Connections program, Synopsys SystemVerilog and VMM Catalyst Programs, has an ongoing affiliation with Mentor Graphics IP group and Modelsim Value Added Partnership (VAP) program, and has established numerous Avery Design VIP partner program affiliations with Rambus, GDA Technologies, ASIC Architect, CAST, and Snowbush. More information about the company may be found at www.avery-design.com.