Gabe Moretti of Chip Design used several points from Jin’s blog post below, in his recent article titled, “Design and Verification Need a Closer Relationship.” The article can be found at: http://bit.ly/1fGyXW2

Today, verification engineers have a whole arsenal in their tool kit in order to combat hidden bugs in the design. Different verification techniques render different working relationship with the designers.

Formal verification is a white-box verification technique, which means formal engineers need to have a good understanding about the internals of the design in order to do effective formal verification. Therefore, formal engineers and RTL designers naturally have a much tighter working relationship than other disciplines.

First, a sound verification methodology should allow equal contribution from all effective techniques, which includes leveraging the exhaustiveness of formal to sign-off on design blocks that are harder to verify with simulation. The block partition between formal and simulation should be clean to simplify the effort on both ends. To achieve that, formal engineers should participate in the architectural planning and exploration stage of design development in order to help influence decisions regarding design partition and block interface. A well-partitioned design with a clean interface will make the decision on where to apply formal, as well as the actual formal verification tasks, much easier.

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