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DVCon Europe is known as a source of practical insight into electronic design techniques and methods. Past attendees are aware that the unusually large number of tutorials for a conference of this size, together with a range of interesting papers, as well as keynotes and panels, offer all kinds of valuable information that can improve their skills and knowledge. What is less apparent is the technical wealth of data provided in the exhibition.
This is the second part of an analysis as to how formal verification has evolved so that it can now be applied to major project challenges. Having described the technology’s foundations in Part One, this article moves on to look at real-world contemporary uses of formal as illustrated by practical examples.
By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Semiconductor Engineering
This isn’t always possible, and not everyone agrees this is necessary. “You don’t have to wait until you get the plan because you will never get the plan because you will never get the specs,” said Ashish Darbari, director of product management at OneSpin Solutions. “The designers’ work is to write some code. ‘I am a directed test person. Ashish came along and told me to write assertions. I love my assertions. Here is an assertion, run coverage. I’m actually covering 30% of this design with this assertion. Okay, another one discovers now I’m at 50%. Oh no, I actually now have a bug because this check I added exposed a bug in my design and now my coverage has gone down.’ Coverage needs to begin the first hour of the design window. If you don’t do that it won’t help.”
Safety critical device development, particularly in the automotive electronics space, has the attention of the entire semiconductor industry. Not surprising, since next-generation cars represent the biggest opportunity yet since mobile devices. However, what’s less obvious are the various phases of this megatrend that represent real convergence from many specializations.
In a recent conversation with OneSpin’s Dave Kelf, he laughed when I asked him to characterize the complexities of meeting functional safety standards when developing automotive electronics. “It’s a whole rat’s nest of certification,” he said, “and as an industry we’re not there yet.
“However, at OneSpin we have a good handle now on what you need to do to make these cars safe. We’ve been working for quite a while with Bosch, Infineon, and other companies that really have a good idea of what needs to happen with the chips in cars to make them safe.
“In fact, a large part of the regulations come from these guys because they’re the experts, along with some level of government oversight, in trying to make sense of it all.”
Jim Hogan of Vista Ventures took attendees on a fanciful exploration of artificial intelligence and convolution neural networks with James Gambale of Lomasoft, Chris Rowen from Cognite Ventures and OneSpin’s Raik Brinkmann. They discussed data gathering and processing and where this is headed.
The notion of horizontals has changed over time. “There are many layers of software and then services on top of that,” added Dave Kelf, OneSpin Solutions. “Lower levels of software are becoming more like hardware. As it becomes a bigger problem, the lower-level blocks become commoditized and a service to the higher-level blocks. It is the highest-level that many associate with innovation.”
Another problem for some IP companies is scale. “The market is such that IP vendors tend to be small companies and the customers tend to be big companies with lots of purchasing power,” remarks Dave Kelf, vice president of marketing for OneSpin Solutions. “If the big company has all of the buying power and there are multiple companies trying to produce the same IP, then it becomes a tough market and the big companies know that they can squeeze on royalties.”
