Building Up the Formal Community

In our visits to many of our customers in the past year, we received a few common requests from companies both large and small:

• Can you help us find formal expertise to hire?
• Can you train our engineers to become formal experts?
• Can you help us build an internal formal team – fast?

The challenge is not about technology; companies now understand the power of formal verification and are embracing it as part of the verification sign-off flow. The challenge is about resources – finding the right people who know formal.

Formal resource is indeed scarce in our industry. All told there are probably fewer than 200 people who are using formal on a full-time basis, applying it to solve the most difficult applications (ABV or End-to-End formal). Most companies have just a few people dedicated to formal; in many cases this is not enough. Oski has 25 dedicated formal verification engineers, one of the largest dedicated formal teams in the industry.

The demand for formal engineers is growing, and we are doing our part to help build up the formal community that supports the industry:

• In all our customer engagement projects, we train engineers; this has been a big part of our service and we have established and supported several teams this way.
• Through our involvement with Decoding Formal Club events and video tutorials on our web site, we offer formal education and facilitate formal knowledge-sharing in the industry to encourage more people to explore formal verification as a career choice.

How to build an internal formal team? We directly address this question in one of two presentations at our upcoming Decoding Formal Club event on Monday April 21, 2014 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Harry Foster from Mentor Graphics will moderate a panel discussion on “How to Build a Productive Formal Team”. Panelists from leading semiconductor companies who have had experience building a formal team will share their tips and insights.

The second presentation is on “Formal Test Planning” delivered by Vigyan Singhal, Oski CEO. Formal test planning too is a very important subject: understanding nature of formal, knowing what can be done with formal and estimating the effort it takes to verify a given design, so formal can be used on blocks with highest ROI. These are the first steps to formal success.

The agenda for the Decoding Formal Club meeting on Monday, April 21, is listed below. Pre-registration is required.

• Welcome & Overview

• Part 1: Oski presentation “Formal Test Planning”

• Lunch
• Part 2: Panel Discussion “How to Build a Productive Formal Team”

• Computer History Museum Tour (self-guided, starts 1:00 PM)

More than half the available spaces have already been reserved by those who attended past Decoding Formal events, so register today.

The registration link is here: www.oskitechnology.com/decodingformal

More information about Oski Technology can be found at: www.oskitechnology.com

See you there!

Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, best practices formal verification, formal test planning, formal verification, Harry Foster, Jin Zhang, Oski Technology

Category: Blog

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