Pitfalls in FPV

Formal verification allows engineers to employ mathematical methods to catch bugs in the RTL description of designs at an early stage in the development process. Formal verification tools find bugs by taking the RTL description and comparing it with an abstract, formal description of the design behavior, derived from the specification. SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA) is …

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Safety vs Liveness properties in formal verification

Formal verification is a crucial aspect of ensuring that digital systems behave as expected under all possible conditions. It relies on specifying and verifying properties to ensure the correctness of a design. These properties serve as formal statements that describe the expected behavior or constraints of a design under verification. Formal engines classify Assertion properties …

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Nondeterministic Signals for Complete and reliable design verification 

Ensuring that the design under verification simulates all the possible scenarios is a challenging task. However, achieving this guarantees the completeness and correctness of the design. The state space of a design is the representation of all possible states that a design can go through during execution. Nondeterminism is one of the most important techniques …

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Formal Verification abstraction methodologies

Why end-to-end proofs? The adoption of formal verification has been on the rise, driven by the performance improvements of formal tools and the increasing demand for exhaustive verification, for example, required by safety standards. Employing end-to-end checks to formally verify a design block can facilitate the creation of formal verification IP (VIP) that covers the …

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Formal Scoreboarding for verifying data ordering and integrity

Formal Verification vs Simulation – Data ordering and integrity Verifying data transportation and movement through a digital design with basic I/O is often considered straightforward with simulation. This approach helps in capturing data losses and data corruption. However, how do you ensure the detection of out-of-order cases, or a single byte dropped from a sequence? …

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Startups as an excellent verification service provider 

It is always difficult for companies to outsource work, especially to startups with no reputation. However, there are many benefits of using a startup as a service provider for you: 1️⃣ Flexibility: It is easier for startups to adjust rapidly to changing requirements, as there are less people involved in decision making and less red tape. …

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Formal Verification versus Simulation

Is simulation still a viable option for functional verification? Simulation is a popular verification technique to identify bugs in hardware, because it scales even for very large and complex designs. However, checking the design behaviour for every possible input sequence is infeasible even for relatively small designs.  This shortcomming cannot be repaired by using coverage metrics …

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