Decoding Formal 
Dr. Jin Zhang
Jin Zhang has over 15 years of experience working in EDA, driving the effort of bringing new products and services to market. At Oski Technology, she is responsible for Oski’s overall marketing strategy as well as business development in Asia Pacific. Prior to that, she was the General Manager at … More » The Abstraction Model – Is It More, Is It Less?January 22nd, 2014 by Dr. Jin Zhang
Oski Technology provides formal verification services to leading semiconductor companies to verify complex design blocks that are difficult to verify using simulation. In our projects, we often write Abstraction Models to overcome formal complexity barriers that would otherwise render formal verification results inconclusive. For example, for the open-source Sun OpenSparc T1 design, verifying a data transport checker without the Abstraction Models would have taken an estimated 991 days of run-time, but only 147 seconds with the Abstraction Models, a significant speed-up of 600,000X. With Abstraction Models and other similar techniques, formal verification can be used as sign-off criteria in the verification flow; Oski has helped many customers adopt and develop formal sign-off flows. Customers often have the misconception that Abstraction Models reduce design behaviors which makes the formal verification task easier and allow it to finish sooner. They worry about missing bugs with Abstraction Models. In reality however, Abstraction Models do not reduce design behaviors; to the contrary they add to design behaviors by adding new reset states, and/or state transitions. As a result, no bug will be missed. More is less because when more behaviors are added purposefully and artfully, they can actually make the formal verification job easier for the tools and take less time. This might be counter-intuitive and may take some time and practice to get used to. But if one understands the concept and techniques of writing and using Abstraction Models, formal verification can be put to much better and broader use. Because each design is different, custom Abstraction Models are needed for each design. There is no Abstraction Model VIP one can purchase to fit all kinds of designs. The good news is that knowing when and how to use Abstraction Models is very much a teachable, learnable skill. We teach our customers about Abstraction Models in our projects and we include the Abstraction Models we develop for the project as source code so customers can write their own Abstraction Models in future projects. Now is your opportunity to learn more about abstraction models. Vigyan Singhal Oski CEO, will be presenting a talk on Abstraction Models in the upcoming Oski Decoding Formal Club event on Jan. 23rd, 2013 in Mountain View, CA. The talk will cover what Abstraction Models are, when you need them, how to write them and how to use them, using real examples. Space is limited, so don’t miss this opportunity to come and learn more about Abstraction Models so your formal verification runs will take less time. Register for Oski Decoding Formal Club event on Jan. 23rd, here. Event: Decoding Formal Club meeting For Abstraction Models, More is Less! Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, Abstraction Models, formal sign-off, formal verification, formal verification methodology Category: Blog |
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