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…)
Decoding Formal
Posts Tagged ‘Oski Technology’
“What if” All Design and Verification Engineers Used Formal?
Monday, November 10th, 2014Formal Verification, by Everyone and for Everyone
Thursday, September 18th, 2014You might still be skeptical of the idea that formal verification can be used by everyone. After all, there is a deep-rooted perception in the industry that formal verification is for the elite few formal experts with Ph.Ds.
This might have been true in the early days of formal technology. The formal tools’ capacity was limited and the use model was not mature. So the aid of someone who actually understood the algorithms “under the hood” was important to help the tool solve the tasks at hand.
However, things have changed dramatically in the last decade. (more…)
Using Formal for Functional Coverage
Wednesday, August 27th, 2014Brian Bailey’s recent article on “Fixing Functional Coverage” in Semiconductor Engineering (http://semiengineering.com/fixing-functional-coverage/) polled experts from different companies about the challenges of catching all the bugs, utilizing assertions and expanding coverage to the entire system. This blog elaborates on the four points we made in Brian’s article about how formal can help with functional coverage. (more…)
Formal Training in High Demand
Thursday, June 19th, 2014This 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…)
How Long Does It Take to Formally Verify This Design?
Friday, June 13th, 2014This year at DAC, we asked attendees to participate in a guessing game – make an educated guess about how long it takes to formally verify a design based on the given design description and statistics.
How Long Does it Take to Formally Verify This Design?
Here is a recap of the information provided to participants:
Design Description
Reorder IP packets that can arrive out of order and dequeue them in order; when an exception occurs, the design flushes the IP packets for which exceptions has occurred. Support 36 different inputs that can send the data for one or more ports. Another interface provides dequeue requests for different ports. Design supports 48 different ports.
Design Interface
Packets arrive with valid signal; a request/grant mechanism for handling requests from 36 different sources; All 36 inputs are independent and can arrive concurrently; All 48 ports can be dequeued in parallel using another request/grant mechanism.
Design Micro-architecture Details
Supports enqueue and dequeue for IP packets for 362 different input and 48 different ports respectively; 48 different queues used to store IP packets for different ports; A round robin arbiter resolves contention between enqueue requests from different sources for the same port at the same cycle. (more…)
Building Up the Formal Community
Tuesday, April 8th, 2014In 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?
Oski Receives DVCon “Honorable Mention” for Best Paper on Bounded Proofs
Thursday, March 20th, 2014DVCon 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.
Oski Innovation Enables Formal Sign-Off in 2013
Thursday, December 19th, 2013A busy year is drawing to a close for Oski Technology. Reflecting back on this year we are proud of what we have accomplished for our valued customers. Oski Formal Sign-off Methodology, incorporating End-to-End checkers, Abstraction Models and formal coverage – this is the boldest application of formal technology for RTL functional verification.
Gone are the days when formal can only be used to compliment simulation on a given block. Oski Formal Sign-off Methodology and formal verification can replace block-level simulation for suitable designs to improve overall verification coverage, efficiency and productivity. The logic is simple – control and data transport types of blocks and designs with complex corner scenarios are better suited to be verified with formal than simulation. We have applied such methodology to tapeout many of our customers’ mission-critical projects and at the same time develop formal expertise in our customer base.
Oski’s Two New Secure Chambers Support Asia Growth
Wednesday, November 6th, 2013Oski Technology, founded by Vigyan Singhal, pioneer and practitioner in formal verification, has earned great respect and reputation in the Silicon Valley for helping customers tape out mission-critical projects using formal technology. Leveraging the power of End-to-End formal verification and Abstraction Models, Oski works with its customers to adopt formal sign-off methodology so that formal verification can become part of the verification sign-off flow. (more…)
Oski Technology: Bullish on Formal Verification
Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013Oski 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…)
