Posts Tagged ‘Vigyan Singhal’
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, September 18th, 2014
You 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…)
Tags: automatic formal, end-to-end checkers, formal sign-off, Oski Technology, SNUG, Vigyan Singhal
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Wednesday, November 6th, 2013
Oski 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…)
Tags: Asia, assertion-based verification, end-to-end checkers, formal sign-off, formal verification methodology, Oski Technology, Rahul Joshi, secure chamber, Vigyan Singhal
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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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Thursday, September 12th, 2013
Formal verification, and in particular model checking, has been around for a few decades now. I found my first post-silicon bug using formal 20 years ago at Motorola Austin in the cache controller block of a PowerPC chip. The power of formal technology drove my Ph.D research and subsequent career in formal verification.
Early on in my career, I focused on developing formal verification tools at Cadence. Later, I founded Jasper and did more of the same. Over the years however, despite the continuous improvement of formal technology, I find that formal adoption has been less than stellar. In particular, I feel people are not harnessing the full power that formal tools can provide. What is needed besides good tools is a scalable methodology.
Methodology is a body of practices, procedures, and rules used in a discipline. In simulation, both open source methodologies e.g. OVM (open verification methodology), UVM (universal verification methodology) and proprietary verification methodologies, internally developed by design teams of a company, exist. These have been of great help to the design and verification communities, which help scale simulation to keep up with the ever increasing complexity of the designs.
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Tags: formal verification, Vigyan Singhal
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Thursday, August 15th, 2013
In our years of providing formal verification services to leading-edge semiconductor companies, I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with many smart and dedicated engineers who paved the way of formal adoption in their companies – studiously applying formal technology to verify more complex designs as well as building up formal methodology so formal can become part of sign-off criteria in their verification flow. I have had countless discussions with these individuals on the nature of formal technology, best practices in formal application, and ways of getting the most out of formal tools in verification. These are valuable mutual learning experiences for all of us.
In working with these formal technologists and practitioners, I have always wanted to create a forum for these kindred spirits – formal enthusiasts, pioneers, leaders and friends who work in different companies but on the same mission. The goal is to promote idea sharing among us so together we can further advance formal technology and broaden formal adoption in the industry.
(more…)
Tags: best practices formal verification, Decoding Formal, Oski, Oski Technology, Vigyan Singhal
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