Demand for Formal Verification Experts in 2023 – Axiomise

By Dr. Ashish Darbari, Founder and CEO, Axiomise

Dr. Ashish Darbari

Previously, functional verification was the biggest challenge. Security and functional safety now dominate concerns and will do so in 2023, especially as the hardware footprint continues to increase in AI/ML, GPUs, networking, HPC, RISC-V, 5G, automotive, IoT, edge computing, and meta-verse.

While each domain brings a differentiated set of verification challenges, at the core, every domain needs functional correctness, safety, and security verification. AI/ML and 5G designs are predominantly data transformation intensive and rely on software requirements to drive optimizations in hardware. The software use model is not mature yet in comparison to classic processors that run on well-defined operating systems and software. 5G designs, in particular, need to be tested for multiple configurations, reliability and QoS and performance.

As our industry is slowing down due to the global recession, it becomes even more important to be efficient and effective at what we do. That includes test and verification of systems, including hardware.

Semiconductor chip design will continue its natural trajectory, but verification needs a step change in controlling the costs of first-time-right chip tape out. That means opportunities for advanced verification techniques, such as formal verification that not only provide a fast turnaround in bug hunting but also provides mathematical proof of bug absence.

Formal techniques are central to successful design and verification. We expect the world to increasingly embrace formal verification and such experts to be in demand in 2023 and beyond. While formal tools improve in performance, tool inter-operability, debugging, and scalability need better solutions in formal EDA. The adoption of formal verification for mainstream functional verification requires a better methodology and understanding of it.

About Ashish Darbari

Dr. Ashish Darbari has been actively using formal methods for more than two decades and is one of the foremost authorities in practical applied formal verification having trained nearly 200 designers and verification engineers globally. A keen innovator in formal verification, he is the founder and CEO of Axiomise and leads it by successfully deploying training, consulting, services and verification IP to a range of customers. Dr. Darbari has expertise in all aspects of formal methods including theorem proving, property checking and equivalence checking. He holds a Doctorate formal verification from the University of Oxford and has 47 patents in formal verification.

Category: EDA Predictions

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2023 at 3:30 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.