Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Verplex Systems | Subject: Conformal Datapath
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 25 April 2003
Verification extends to complex
datapaths
To answer the challenge of formally verifying designs that have compiled datapath circuitry, Verplex Systems has developed Conformal Datapath (DP).
To answer the challenge of formally verifying designs that have compiled datapath circuitry, Verplex Systems has developed Conformal Datapath (DP), a new component of its family of formal verification products Conformal DP addresses verification challenges faced by teams developing timing critical applications such as graphics, multi-media, DSP, and communications, which often require advanced datapath optimisation
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 23 Mar 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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"Verplex is the first to offer a complete solution that enables designers to verify complex datapath blocks", says Andy Lin, Verplex Vice President of Engineering.
"Without equivalence checking, designers have to rely on simulation with all of its drawbacks such as challenging debug, degraded quality of verification, increased risk of expensive silicon respins due to missed bugs, and unbearably long run times often leading to schedule delays".
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According to Lin, datapath has always been a difficult challenge for equivalence checking due to the complexity of formally verifying complex arithmetic operators.
It is becoming even more challenging due to EDA vendors incorporating datapath capability into standard synthesis tools to help engineers meet their timing requirements.
"Verification engineers and hardware designers are increasingly asking for the capability to formally verify designs that have gone through complex arithmetic optimisations".
Synthesis design tools have grown so complex that an independent verification tool, such as Conformal DP, is needed to audit the process by which they generate circuitry, ensuring correct synthesis results.
Other formal verification tools are not independent, and may require side files, or data clandestinely passed from the synthesis tool, in order to verify the circuits.
This greatly increases the risk that the formal verification tool uses the same assumptions that were made during the synthesis process, causing it to miss bugs introduced by the synthesis tool.
"Conformal DP has proven to be very effective in verifying our designs that have gone through complex arithmetic optimisations", remarks Hiroshi Furukawa, Assistant Manager, System-on-a-Chip Design Division of NEC Micro Systems in Japan.
"Verifying datapath circuits has been very difficult and time consuming in the past, but we have found Conformal DP to be very efficient in comparing different types of datapath circuits".
With Conformal DP, designers can reliably verify datapath blocks using equivalence checking, doing away with simulation as a stopgap measure.
As a result, design teams can now confidently and exhaustively verify datapath circuits with the proven accuracy of equivalence checking.
Verplex's Conformal DP is capable of handling a wide variety of datapath structures required for high performance designs.
Key features include: automatic verification of datapath modules; automatic verification of merged operators; advanced pipelining; and carry-save verification.
While other equivalence checkers handle only portions of a design, Conformal DP extends support to complex synthesised datapath.
With the addition of datapath capability, the Conformal family of equivalence checking products offer a comprehensive package for complete and independent system-on-chip (SoC) verification.
Designers can perform datapath verification using the same Verplex environment that has previously scaled to address their needs in embedded memory, custom I/O, hard intellectual property (IP), custom logic needs, as well as any other future complex verification requirements.
Conformal DP is available now and is sold as an addon to Verplex's Conformal logic equivalence checker.
It is supported on Hewlett Packard HP-UX, Sun Microsystems Solaris, IBM AIX, and Linux operating systems platforms.
The US price for a three year, time-based licence is $45,600 per year.
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