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From Semiconductor Engineering: OneSpin’s CEO looks at why formal verification is suddenly a must-have technology.

From Chip Design, Page 12: The push toward automotive safety continues as more designers learn how to work within the Functional Safety Standard ISO 26262 regulations.

From Semiconductor Engineering Exclusive: What happens when you put formal leaders from all over the world in the same room and give them an hour to discuss deployment?

From Semiconductor Engineering: ESL is many things to different people. "If I am defining a system, I am really not concerned with the hardware at all", says Raik Brinkmann, president and CEO of OneSpin Solutions. "I am defining a system that does something useful and I am not concerned if it is implemented in hardware or software. Everything I do is a choice of optimization. The optimal solution for you may be defined by performance or the price point. We need something that can define the whole system and can then be broken down into smaller pieces. Then we can use the tools that we already have. Mapping into hardware is one thing that is done today, but people who were expecting something to map software into hardware using HLS were disappointed."

From Semiconductor Engineering: Formal verification is gaining in popularity as the amount of data grows, as well. Long ignored, misunderstood, or underutilized, formal has turned out to be a highly efficient use of verification resources.

“Verification has always been an issue with big data,” said Dave Kelf, vice president of marketing at OneSpin Solutions. “Engineers get a mass of data and they have no time to go through it all. If a chip doubles in size, there is a massive amount of new data. And now physical effects are making their way into verification.”

Kelf said that formal is basically a huge database, and as security issues become more pronounced and produce their own volumes of data - It’s being used to transition between states that can be used for side-channel attacks. “What you’re doing is characterizing the propagation of information through a device. So is there is a secret key, you can propagate that through a device on every signal the key goes through. The formal tool figures it out. This is big data. What you’re doing is monitoring the path directly. It acts like a big filter. The machines are powerful enough to handle this, and big data is contained in the database.”

From Semiconductor Engineering: Experts at the table, part 2: IP vendors are facing new challenges and for some of them, such as security, the tools and methodologies are not in place.

From Semiconductor Engineering: “The rate of new, differentiating features being added by the automotive companies, along with the pace of change toward completely autonomous vehicles, is staggering,” said Jorg Grosse, safety critical verification specialist at OneSpin Solutions. “Keeping the regulations up to date with this trend has proven difficult, but it is essential. This has driven groups from across the industry to regularly meet to consider how the regulations must keep up with the technology. The end result is a moving target for ISO 26262 revisions and a new chapter of the standard, focused on ‘the application of concepts for semiconductors,’ is currently under development. Tool vendors must stay current with the standard and many of them have teams involved in its development to feedback changes from their engineer teams for inclusion. It is this collaborative mechanism that is essential to allow the design flow to keep up with market forces.”

From Semiconductor Engineering - Experts at the table, part 1: The verification of blocks and IP is undergoing significant change and the experts have some diverse opinions on the way forward including the role of simulation.