Posts Tagged ‘Oski Technology’
Wednesday, September 9th, 2015
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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Tags: #52DAC, best practices formal verification, Break the Testbench Challenge, formal sign-off, Oski Technology
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Wednesday, August 12th, 2015
EDA’s verification market segment is not the only place where something’s named for the Cal (University of California, Berkeley) mascot Oski. A Blue and Gold Fleet boat named Oski sails out of Pier 39 in San Francisco and takes visitors around the Bay and Alcatraz.
When I saw the Oski pulling away from the pier, I couldn’t help but draw an analogy between Oski Technology’s mission and the choppy waters the boat was heading into on that sunny day. Sunny days and choppy waters are something verification engineers can face on a daily basis. Verification tasks are so challenging in today’s for system-on-chip (SoC) designs that verification alone takes more than 60% of the project cycle. What’s more, simulation alone for SoC designs will leave large holes for bugs to sneak through, all the way to silicon. The challenge of verification actually is more daunting than the choppy waters of San Francisco Bay.
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Tags: formal verification, Oski Technology
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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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Saturday, June 6th, 2015
Oski Decoding Formal Events are usually hosted at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and have attracted lots of formal enthusiasts in the bay area. Deep formal talks from Oski, lectures given by formal experts from different companies, good networking, cool gifts and museum tours have become the signature of these events that formal engineers look forward to, every quarter.
To reach out to formal enthusiasts around the world and create a bigger event than usual, the 2015 Q2 Decoding Formal event will be hosted at DAC. Our theme is proving completeness of End-to-End Formal for Sign-off.
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Tags: #52DAC, formal sign-off, formal verification, formal verification methodology, 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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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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Wednesday, April 1st, 2015
“Shift Left” has become a hot phrase after Aart’s keynote speech at DVCon2015 where he talked about how shifting left in schedule resulted from 10x productivity gain in design, IP, verification and software can spur on 100x opportunities in applications across all fields. He suggested many of these technological advances have the potential of changing what mankind is all about.
Static and formal techniques were mentioned as one of the mechanisms that increase productivity and contribute to shift left in the verification schedule. There are several reasons why formal technology is a key driver for the left shift.
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Tags: advanced formal training, formal sign-off, formal verification, Jin Zhang, Oski Technology
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Monday, March 16th, 2015
I recently read a blog written by Dr. Noa Kageyama, performance psychologist and Juilliard alumnus and faculty member, titled “The Perils of Aiming Low: How Our Expectations Can Shape Our Students’ Learning & Performance.”
Based on research findings from schools and sports, Dr. Kageyama concluded that high expectations from teachers and coaches correlate positively with an individual’s learning and growth, helping improve confidence and making the most of one’s ability.
The blog resonates with me because I am a parent, always seeking ways to help my daughters reach their maximum potential. But It also reminds me of a common practice I see in the industry regarding formal verification adoption.
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Tags: 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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