Posts Tagged ‘“Decoding Formal” Club’
Wednesday, March 29th, 2017
What better way to celebrate the arrival of spring than another meeting of the Decoding Formal Club! The Decoding Formal Club is a forum for formal verification enthusiasts, pioneers, leaders and friends who work to promote the sharing of ideas, advancement of formal verification technology, and adoption of formal sign-off methodology within the industry. On Tuesday, March 21, the club met to hear presentations from Oski, Nvidia and Arteris.
Vigyan Singhal, Oski CEO and formal verification visionary, started us off by introducing the concept of architectural formal verification. Some system level requirements are, by their very nature, well suited for formal verification. Cache coherence, absence of deadlocks and security features are examples of things that we would want to verify with formal. However, the complexity of today’s systems makes it impractical to do so at the RTL level. Instead, Vigyan talked about how Oski uses abstract components to build a system-level model that can be successfully analyzed by formal verification.
 Many in attendance liked this approach but also noted the challenge of ensuring that the behavior of the abstract components matches the implementation in RTL. Vigyan explained how Oski’s methodology has that covered when the properties of the abstract models are validated against the RTL designs to close the loop.
Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, architectural formal verification, best practices formal verification, formal analysis, formal sign-off, formal verification
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Monday, December 12th, 2016
It’s undeniable: I am a newcomer to the formal verification scene. As one of the newest members of the Oski team, I didn’t know what to expect when I attended the Oski Decoding Formal Club meeting on October 11th. Oski hosted the event at the acclaimed Parcel 104 Restaurant in the Santa Clara Marriott hotel. The ever popular event was sponsored by Synopsys, and provided attendees from semiconductor companies like Apple, Cavium, Cisco, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Western Digital and Xilinx with a great opportunity to network with other formal verification experts and engineers. Our taste buds were treated to a delectable meal made with locally harvested and sustained California ingredients, a Parcel 104 specialty, while Mandar Munishwar (Qualcomm), Ankit Saxena (Oski) and Vigyan Singhal (Oski) engaged our minds with presentations on intriguing formal topics.
Ankit Saxena (Oski) started off the series with a deep dive into “Verifying the Datapath for an AMD Processor”, which he worked on jointly with Sankar Gurumurthy (AMD), Farhan Rahman (AMD) and Ashutosh Prasad (Oski). Ankit’s talk described how data transform designs such as complex multipliers and dividers can be formally verified. View talk here.
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Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, Decoding Formal, formal verification, Oski
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Friday, June 3rd, 2016
If you are attending the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Austin, Texas, June 5-9, and need a good reason to stay an extra day, look no further. Oski Technology is offering a one-day primer on advanced formal verification techniques at the DAC Decoding Formal one-day training, “Achieving Formal Sign-off”, on Thursday, June 9, from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. at the Hilton Hotel, Austin.
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Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, #53DAC, advanced formal training, formal analysis, formal sign-off, formal verification, formal verification methodology, Oski Technology, Vigyan Singhal
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Tuesday, May 17th, 2016
As in any engineering endeavor, formal verification involves engaging individuals in many different roles, often including formal managers and, given the technically deep and complex nature of FV, nearly always one or more formal experts. The manager of the formal verification effort on a project may have formal as his or her primary or sole responsibility, or may manage multiple aspects of verification (e.g. both simulation and FV). However, even a full-time formal verification manager may or may not drive the overall formal program in their company or organization.
In part one of this discussion, I talked about the emerging role of the Formal Verification (FV) Program Leader, an individual who enables and drives the formal process by navigating organizational dynamics, understanding designs and their verification complexities and schedules, developing and presenting ROI trade-offs, etc.; all to help achieve project goals. I listed six aspects of this role that the FV Program Leader must master in order to effectively lead the adoption and deployment of formal verification: Organization, Training and Upskilling, Test Planning, Progress Metrics, Sign-off Process, and Post Mortem Analysis.
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Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, Achieving Formal Sign-off, formal verification, Formal Verification Program Leader, Oski Technology, post-mortem analysis, progress metrics, sign-off process, test planning, training, Training Day DAC 2016, upskilling, Vigyan Singhal
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Thursday, March 24th, 2016
In December 2015, Oski challenged formal users to build the fastest testbench to solve our Oski Formal Puzzler – the Chessboard Challenge, Berkeley Math Circle Monthly Contest 8, 2011, proposed and designed by Evan O’Dorney, three-time Putnam Fellow. Jesse Bingham from Intel submitted the winning entry, as was announced during a presentation at the recent meeting of the Decoding Formal Club in Santa Clara, CA on February 29, 2016. This was an opportunity to promote the adoption of formal verification across the semiconductor industry, and share formal techniques by showing how they might be used to solve a fun formal puzzle. (more…)
Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, chessboard challenge, formal analysis, formal sign-off, formal verification, Oski Technology, Pippa Slayton, Vigyan Singhal
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Wednesday, December 9th, 2015
“Jingle Bells”, “Silent Night”, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”… It has been several weeks since my youngest daughter started practicing for her upcoming violin concert. I grew up in China and missed out on the fun of Christmas festivities and holiday music. Now that we live in the United States and have had the full holiday experience, I learned that Santa Claus comes to town – two months early!
With the holiday season upon us and reflecting on the past year, 2015 has been a very busy and rewarding time for Oski. The hard work put in by each of our colleagues is paying off – with the growing adoption of formal technology and formal sign-off methodology at many companies across the globe. Formal Verification is finally coming to town!
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Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, #formalpuzzler, chessboard challenge, formal puzzler, model checking, Oski Holiday Challenge, Oski Holiday Chessboard Challenge, Oski Technology, verilog
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Friday, November 13th, 2015
The recent Decoding Formal Club meeting hosted by Oski Technology on October 21, 2015 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View celebrated the club’s 2nd anniversary with a “back to the future” twist.
While many of the predictions in the movie “Back to Future Part II” did not come true on October 21, 2015, the day of “the future” to which Marty McFly and Doc Brown time travel in a flying silver DeLorean sports car, that didn’t deter us from inviting attendees from Apple, ARM, Arteris, Broadcom, Ericsson, Google, Imagination, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Palo Alto Networks, Qualcomm and others to make some timely predictions for formal verification in 2025. The group was comprised of formal experts with years of experience, as well as engineers who are new to formal verification, so the predictions for 2025 were daring, but quite possible.
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Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, formal sign-off, formal verification, Oski Technology, Pippa Slayton
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Thursday, September 24th, 2015
On the radio yesterday, we heard that the song “Happy Birthday To You”, one of the most widely sung tunes in the world, was ruled by federal judge George H. King to finally be in the public domain!
This welcome news seems to come at the right time, as Oski Technology plans to celebrate the second anniversary of the Decoding Formal Club at our quarterly meeting on October 21 at Computer History Museum, in Mountain View.
Since it was founded in October 2013, the Decoding Formal Club has drawn the attention of engineers, designers and verification managers. In a relatively short time we have covered much ground, and become a forum where formal knowledge and experience can be shared among the growing community of formal enthusiasts. In turn, Oski’s featured presentations have covered many aspects of formal sign-off methodology: Bounded Proof, Abstraction Models, Formal Test Planning, End-to-End Checkers and Constraint Management.
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Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, #ARM, formal analysis, formal verification methodology, Oski "Break the Testbench" Challenge 2015 DAC, Oski Technology, Oski Verification Challenge, Prashant Aggarwal, Vigyan Singhal
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Friday, June 19th, 2015
The story of Louis Zamperini, as told by Laura Hillenbrand in “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption”, is a great testimony of the strength of human spirit. Going through unimaginable catastrophes, including drifting 47 days on the open sea with leaping sharks, thirst, starvation, and machine gun attack from a bomber plane, as well as enduring 3 years under severe and brutal conditions as a POW in Japan, Zamperini emerged unbroken with grace, humanity and love.
This is such an inspiring story that when I thought about writing about Oski DAC 2015 “Break the Testbench” Challenge results, the word “unbroken” came to mind. While this is no comparison in its scale to the story of Zamperini, the word “unbroken” succinctly summarizes the challenge result.
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Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, #ARM, formal sign-off, Oski Technology, Vigyan Singhal
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Monday, May 18th, 2015
You may remember the Oski Technology Live Verification Challenge in 2012, where during the 72 hours of DAC, Oski verification engineer Chirag Agarwal formally verified a well-simulated design from NVIDIA, sight unseen, live and on camera, and found 4 corner case bugs. The challenge results exceeded everyone’s expectations, and inspired other companies to do more with formal in their verification flow. See the Live Oski Verification Challenge, and a blog recap and six-minute video, here.
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Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, #52DAC, 2012 Oski Challenge, 2015 "Break the Testbench" Challenge, formal sign-off, Oski "Break the Testbench" Challenge 2015 DAC, Oski Live Verification Challenge, Oski Technology
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Many in attendance liked this approach but also noted the challenge of ensuring that the behavior of the abstract components matches the implementation in RTL. Vigyan explained how Oski’s methodology has that covered when the properties of the abstract models are validated against the RTL designs to close the loop.
