Formal verification, and in particular model checking, has been around for a few decades now. I found my first post-silicon bug using formal 20 years ago at Motorola Austin in the cache controller block of a PowerPC chip. The power of formal technology drove my Ph.D research and subsequent career in formal verification.
Early on in my career, I focused on developing formal verification tools at Cadence. Later, I founded Jasper and did more of the same. Over the years however, despite the continuous improvement of formal technology, I find that formal adoption has been less than stellar. In particular, I feel people are not harnessing the full power that formal tools can provide. What is needed besides good tools is a scalable methodology.
Methodology is a body of practices, procedures, and rules used in a discipline. In simulation, both open source methodologies e.g. OVM (open verification methodology), UVM (universal verification methodology) and proprietary verification methodologies, internally developed by design teams of a company, exist. These have been of great help to the design and verification communities, which help scale simulation to keep up with the ever increasing complexity of the designs.
