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Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design

"FMCAD 2013 is the thirteenth in a series of conferences on the theory and applications of formal methods in hardware and system verification. FMCAD provides a leading forum to researchers in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for reasoning formally about computing systems. FMCAD covers formal aspects of computer-aided system design including verification, specification, synthesis, and testing."

Formal methods is an important area of reasearch for the EDA industry. OneSpin Solutions is proud to sponser this year's event. FMCAD 2013 is held at the University Place Hotel & Conference Center, 310 SW Lincoln St, Portland, Oregon 97201, USA October 20-23, 2013.

Peggy Aycinena interviews Dave Kelf for EDACafe in "OneSpin’s Cloud vision: Knock, knock, knocking at heaven’s door."

If heaven is in the Cloud, OneSpin is knocking at the door, because last week the company announced its Cloud Computing System moved from beta to full-on availability on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. There it “provides secure and fully automated solutions for advanced formal verification, offering the functionality provided by OneSpin 360 DV-Inspect and 360 DV-Verify.”

This news is interesting if you think it’s a rarity for an EDA company to brag on their Cloud capability, the received wisdom being that neither EDA vendors nor EDA customers want to conduct their technical business outside of their own firewall. Given the less-than-remarkable traction that Cloud-based anything has had in the EDA/IP ecosystem, it was great to have a chance to speak to OneSpin’s Dave Kelf this week regarding his company’s news.

OneSpin’s Raik Brinkmann serves as an eloquent spokesman for cloud computing within EDA, notes Brian Fuller of Cadence

Amelia Dalton interviews OneSpin CEO Raik Brinkmann for EE Journal on FPGAs and Design Automation in the Cloud.

Fish Fry heads into the cloud this week. We talk with two different CEOs from two different EDA companies about how their forays into the cloud set them apart from the rest of the EDA pack and promise to make our design lives a whole lot easier. With Dr. Raik Brinkmann (CEO - OneSpin Solutions) we discuss OneSpin's formal verification tool suite and how it works in the cloud, and why Raik thinks karate and engineering have a lot in common. We also chat with Harn Ng (CEO - Plunify) about how this Singapore-based EDA company is looking to revolutionize the FPGA design process.

After sitting out DAC last year, OneSpin Solutions was back, exhibiting and demonstrating our innovative formal assertion-based verification and formal equivalence checking solutions.

Overall, we considered the 50th DAC to be a great success. From what we heard, we weren’t alone in our assessment. The exhibit floor was busy all three days and the technical sessions hopping. In general, most of the exhibitors were happy with attendance and thought DAC was worthwhile. No one knew what to expect, given the Austin location and the general health of the economy and EDA industry.

We’re pleased with the number of leads we collected from DAC and attribute much of it to our pre-DAC marketing and public relations campaign. We started upping our visibility around November last year and went into high gear at DVCon earlier this year. I highly recommend this strategy to all DAC exhibitors for next year.

The OneSpin leads collected over the three days offer a look into the demographic makeup of this year’s attendees. About 75% of attendees who visited OneSpin’s booth were from the United States and almost half of those were from Texas. Most of the other visitors hailed from California, while about 9% were from Europe and 8% from Southeast Asia and Japan. What may be most interesting is a whopping 86% of attendees who visited our booth were from large, well-known companies.

Tom Anderson of Breker Verification Systems shares his view on EDA in the Cloud

A year or two ago, cloud computing was a hot topic at EDA events and conferences. The industry’s largest player, Synopsys, talked a lot about running their EDA tools in the cloud and claimed a great deal of customer interest in this area. Earlier this year, CEO Aart de Geus was quoted as saying that “Synopsys had made $0 on it.” What happened? Is the idea of EDA in the cloud dead? What are the issues preventing its adoption?

While it hasn’t completely turned our lives upside down yet, yes, the cloud has worked its way into more and more things. And we’ve seen it tip-toe into the world of EDA, although it’s not clear that it’s really sticking so far, and it has some detractors, and there are even those who went to the cloud and then left again.

So was that not such a good idea? Is the cloud for EDA going the way of push technology?

Well, not so fast. OneSpin recently announced their use of the cloud. Yes, they’re aware of the other things going on, and they appear to have done their homework and were ready for the many questions I had for them. They’re doing things slightly differently from others, and they have what they believe to be a solution to the Achilles’ heel of EDA cloud solutions – a solution that’s unique to their EDA field.

Abstract

• Due to the wide range of different MCU types that are developed within a series of Renesas MCU’s in order to satisfy different applications we have developed the MCU-PF platform for both design and verification of a complete series of MCUs. A key issue is the effective verification for a combination of multiple IP components -this presents a significant task.

• The test-case based simulation method of verification is widely used, but testcases are not reusable among MCU designs, and modification of the test-cases and the testbench takes a long time. Verification coverage is only partial when using test-case based simulation. As such we have developed the capability to use a Formal method of verification that provides full coverage of combinations of assertions while delivering significant reductions in both testing and verification time. Additional efficiency has been gained because the IP-Assertions are fully reusable along with the IP itself. This paper explains the methodology, its advantages and performance results compared to the simulation verification method.