Posts Tagged ‘“Decoding Formal” Club’
Friday, May 1st, 2015
My daughter has been learning violin for the last 5 years with a wonderful Suzuki teacher. She emphasizes proper posture, beautiful tone and a good work ethic. This has built a solid foundation for my daughter to venture into learning other instruments. Last fall my daughter started playing flute for her school band, and viola at Young String Ensemble, the youngest division of Portland Youth Philharmonic, founded in 1929 as the first youth orchestra in the United States.
To help her prepare for the upcoming audition for the more advanced Portland Youth Conservatory Orchestra, we decided she would take some viola lessons with the Oregon Symphony Principal Violist. We were totally blown away after just one lesson.
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Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, #52DAC, formal analysis, formal sign-off, formal verification, formal verification methodology, Oski Technology
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Friday, January 16th, 2015
According to statistics published in 2014 by the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, 45% Americans usually make New Year’s Resolutions. And people who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t.
The largest resolution category –– 47%, is related to self-improvement and education. This is me, trying to squeeze time in my busy schedule to work out and keep my brain sharp by learning new things. This year, our family joined a new health club where I can watch TED Talks as I walk, and I am embarking on a learning journey with my sixth grader on Machine Learning & Robot Design. It has been fun!
As the Director of Marketing at Oski Technology, my New Year’s Resolution for Oski is simple –– Treading Deep into Formal. In the past 18 months, we successfully hosted five Decoding Formal Club events where we, and our invited guests, shared some of the deepest knowledge and practical experiences about formal that cannot be found elsewhere.
We have covered many deep formal topics such as Abstraction Models, Bound Analysis, End-to-End Checkers, and Formal Test Planning, all with the goal to achieve Formal Sign-off. Invited guests from industry formal leaders, such as NVIDIA and Broadcom, shared their experiences deploying formal. With deep formal talks, opportunities for formal networking, good food and cool gifts, Decoding Formal Club has become a magnet that attracts formal enthusiasts. It is where deep formal learning happens.
Carrying on the theme of Treading Deep into Formal into 2015, our first Decoding Formal Club meeting will be held Monday, February 9, from 11:30 a.m. until 4:15 p.m. at our usual location, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
We have an agenda packed with Deep Formal Talks and lots of fun! It will include talks by:
- Vigyan Singhal, chief executive officer of Oski Technology, who will share another important topic in Formal Sign-off –– constraint management.
- NVIDIA Principal Engineer Jon Michelson, co-author of “The Art of Verification with SystemVerilog Assertions” and “The Art of Verification with Vera,” who will present “A Practical Viewpoint on Liveness versus Safety.”
- Ross Weber, Staff Design Engineer at ARM and author of the best paper award at the Jasper User Group 2014, who will discuss formal achievements at ARM.
While attendees tread deeply into the formal space, we will bring them back with a special invited guest Cliff Stoll. His TED Talk, “The Call to Learn” inspired us to offer one of his Acme Klein Bottles as a giveaway. And with the Chinese New Year coming February 19, attendees will be in for Chinese flair and other surprises.
The event space can hold only 40 people, and we intentionally keep the event small to offer the best learning and networking experience. Our goal is to make it the best four hours of an attendee’s work week.
Come and join us as we Tread Deep into Formal in 2015. It will be exciting!
Visit the Decoding Formal registration page, here.
Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, #ARM, Cliff Stoll, constraints, Jin Zhang, Jon Michelson, NVIDIA, Oski Technology, Ross Weber, Vigyan Singhal
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Monday, December 22nd, 2014
2014 has been an exciting year for advances in technology, and another successful year for Oski Technology.
Applying formal verification technology to the most challenging formal verification problems has been at the core of Oski’s business for nearly 10 years, and in 2014 we continued this journey with customers and partners from more than a dozen companies, many of which are in the top 10 performers in the industry. We expanded our business in Asia by more than 5x, at many new companies whose managers are extremely judicious about where money is being spent in their verification effort.
We continue to balance growth in our customer base with a commitment to advancing the application of formal verification in the industry, by teaching the “how”, as we go. In 2014 we offered advanced formal sign-off training to many of our customers, and have received overwhelmingly positive feedback about how this program has helped these teams navigate the complexity of applying formal verification.
Another important aspect of our commitment to the advancement of the application of formal verification is the user-focused Decoding Formal Club which started out as the Decoding Formal video tutorial series, launched at DAC in 2013. The goal of the Decoding Formal Club is to foster knowledge-sharing about the use of formal verification within the industry. The past few years have seen explosive growth and interest in these events, where we have discussed a range of practical topics of special interest to formal verification engineers, including a popular panel “How to Build a Productive Formal Team” addressing an important question for every manager tasked with adopting formal verification.
We took our June Decoding Formal Club meeting to DAC in San Francisco, in the form of a two-hour DAC Insight tutorial focused on the application of formal test planning, and why it is key to formal sign-off. The most popular videos show highlights from each presentation: “Formal Test Planning”, “Formal Test Planning: Case Studies”, and “Abstraction Models”. Video for the latest event in October 2014, “Formal Talks: Methodology, Application, Real-World Experience”, is here.
The Decoding Formal Club welcomed an impressive array of guest speakers and panelists this year, including Normando Montecillo from Broadcom, Flemming Anderson from Intel, Da Chuang from Memoir Systems (since acquired by Cisco), Prosenjit Chatterjee from NVIDIA, Joanne Ottney from Palo Alto Networks, Syed Suhaib from NVIDIA, and Bob Kurshan, a pioneer of formal verification.
The future for formal verification looks bright, and those at the forefront continue to be optimistic about 2015 and beyond. Bob Kurshan, presenter, states in an interview at the Decoding Formal Club meeting in October 2014, that while there will always be room for simulation, formal will one day be the “workhorse” of verification; others are in strong agreement. Short video interviews featuring Bob Kurshan, Brian Bailey (Semiconductor Engineering), Richard Newton (Ericcson), Kaowen Liu (MediaTek) and Shiva Borzin (OneSpin), and Jin Zhang (Oski Technology), are here. The next meeting is scheduled for February 9, 2015, details to be announced; subscribe here.
With another year behind us, we remain optimistic about the rate at which formal technology is being advanced and adopted. The technology has never moved so fast, as is true of its practical application, especially in the area of end-to-end formal which replaces simulation for verification sign-off. This is an exciting period to be working with formal. We are past the point of no return. As the European Space Agency (ESA) announced during the Rosetta mission, after the Philae lander was released for its trip to the surface of comet 67P, “There’s no going back now.”
Prospects are good that 2015 will be better than ever for technological advances of all kinds. And what better time to say it. “There’s no going back now.”
Happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year!
Oski Technology
P.S. Decode the binary message in the our holiday card (or below), and reply to us at 67P @oskitech.com
01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01001000 01101111 01101100 01101001 01100100 01100001 01111001 01110011 00100001
 [[Begin secret holiday message. End message. Proceed with festivities.]] 
Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, European Space Agency, Oski Technology, Robert Kurshan, Vigyan Singhal
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Monday, November 10th, 2014
What if all design and verification engineers used formal? What if formal tools become smart enough to do the abstractions? What if formal tools had infinite capacity? These and other questions were proposed by attendees on the event survey for this quarter’s Decoding Formal Club event on October 23, 2014 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. (more…)
Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, Apple, Broadcom, formal sign-off, formal verification methodology, NVIDIA, Oski Technology, Palo Alto Networks, Qualcomm, Robert Kurshan, Syed Suhaib, Vigyan Singhal
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Thursday, June 19th, 2014
This year at DAC, a question asked repeatedly got our attention: Do you offer advanced formal training program?
While we are not surprised by the request itself, the number, size, type and location of companies that asked about this was surprising. It included a wide spectrum of companies, from the U.S., Japan, Korea, China, along with large companies with established formal teams as well as small start-ups with no formal experience. Even EDA vendors asked if we could do training for them. (more…)
Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, #51DAC, advanced formal training, formal analysis, formal sign-off, formal test planning, formal training, Oski Technology
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Thursday, March 20th, 2014
DVCon 2014 was a terrific show for Oski Technology. Not only were we proud to receive an “Honorable Mention” for (2nd) Best Paper at DVCon “Sign-off with Bounded Formal Verification Proofs”, we had the opportunity to have many meaningful conversations with existing customers and others new to formal verification and eager to learn more about what is possible with formal verification. Our DVCon “Sign-off” paper is available on the Oski Technology Web site. See our DVCon 2014 video here.
DVCon 2014 Oski Technology, Vigyan Singhal
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Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, DVCon, DVCon best paper, formal sign-off, formal verification, Mentor Graphics, Oski Technology, Samsung Electronics
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Monday, February 3rd, 2014
Oski Technology launched the quarterly Decoding Formal Club with the goal of creating an industry-wide, independent platform for all formal enthusiasts to share ideas, challenges and solutions so as to advance formal technology and promote formal sign-off in the industry.
On Jan. 23rd 2014, we had our second meeting in the Computer History Museum. 28 formal enthusiasts (many of them formal experts) gathered from 16 different companies including ACM, Broadcom, Cadence, Chelsio, Cisco, Ericsson, Ikanos, Jasper, MediaTek, Mentor Graphics, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, SMI, Synopsys and a stealth startup. Talks were given by Normando Montecillo from Broadcom on data integrity verification and Vigyan Singhal, Oski CEO, on Abstraction Models.
It was a very successful event as demonstrated by the anonymous survey results. Answers to the question “What are your primary goals for attending the event?” reinforced the original intention of the group’s founders, that is to facilitate knowledge sharing and networking among formal experts. (more…)
Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, formal sign-off, formal verification
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Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014
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
Date: Thursday January 23, 2014
Time: 1:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Venue: Mountain View, CA.
For Abstraction Models, More is Less!
Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, Abstraction Models, formal sign-off, formal verification, formal verification methodology
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Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013
Oski Technology may be named for the famous University of California at Berkeley’s bear mascot, but Oski is not bearish at all on the formal verification market. In fact, it’s downright bullish on this form of verification and its importance to chip design.
One recent morning, Vigyan Singhal, Oski’s president and CEO, was in the Mountain View, Calif., corporate headquarters ready to discuss his life in formal verification and what inspires him and the company he founded. (more…)
Tags: "Decoding Formal" Club, #50DAC, assertion-based verification, Decoding Formal, Deep Formal Award, end-to-end checkers, FMCAD, formal sign-off, formal verification, formal verification methodology, formal verification services, Oski Technology, Oski Verification Challenge, Rahul Joshi, Vigyan Singhal
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