In the news

CARVING OUT NEW NICHES: At DAC 2019, I gave Raik Brinkmann a hard time about
his OneSpin tools missing in action in my 2018 survey.  His comeback was:
      
And sure enough, here's the users this year commenting on each of these
specialized 4 OneSpin apps.  (It's common for formal tools to be sold as
an "app" instead of a standalone SW package.)

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      QUESTION ASKED:

        Q: "What were the 3 or 4 most INTERESTING specific EDA tools
            you've seen this year?  WHY did they interest you?"

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ONESPIN'S SURPRISE COMEBACK: In the "Best of 2018", last year OneSpin was
amazingly weak.  Users wrote 4,988 words about ABV tools in 2018; and only
a measily 59 words were about *anything* OneSpin.  (Talk about weak! Ouch!)
        
But now, for "Best of 2019", OneSpin got ~3,000 users words on the OneSpin
vs. JasperGold wars covered here and in DAC'19 #5b -- plus ~1,400 more user
words OneSpin's other tools. (See DAC'19 5c.)  Talk about a comeback!

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WHERE ONESPIN WINS: The 3 areas where users gave OneSpin high marks were
assertion observation coverage, speed, and safety (fault injection).
                
  1. Assertion Observation Coverage

    "OneSpin's Quantify app uses the 'mutation' method.  The mutation
     method injects a forced logic state on each individual signal,
     then evaluates if the assertion passes or fails.  This gives you
     100% coverage. ... JasperGold's Cone of Influence (COI) coverage
     method is less comprehensive than mutation."

  2. Speed

    "OneSpin is better than JasperGold for complex properties.  For
     example, to prove a complex property on one design we verified,
     OneSpin took 2 hours, JasperGold took 20 hours   However, it
     is difficult to generalize these results from a few designs."

  3. Fault Injection

    "With fault injection, to ensure your design won't let catastrophic
     failures occur, Faults are deliberately injected.  OneSpin has a
     fault injection capability in their core tool.  Cadence does not
     include fault injection in their core tool -- it's an add-on."

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WHERE JASPER WINS: From the user comments, JasperGold has this amazing debug
capabilty that's intuitive -- while OneSpin is seen as basic at best:

    "OneSpin's user interface is a bit old-fashioned."

    "It's debugging complex counter examples is painful within the GUI."

    "OneSpin's debugger takes some getting used to."

    "Their code debugging is "ugh"."

But beyond this GUI drawback, OneSpin has some killer capabilities.

By Sergio Marchese, Electronics Weekly

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