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In the news

Driving Toward Functionality

Electronic Engineering Journal logo

By Amelia Dalton, Electronic Engineering Journal

In this week’s episode of Fish Fry, we take a closer look at the world of formal verification. Dave Kelf (OneSpin) joins us to discuss the mechanics of systematic verification and random verification and why automotive and other safety-critical applications may prove to be the most effective use of formal verification yet. We also chat about the themes found at this year’s Design Automation Conference including why Dave believes that the convergence of HLS and System-C, FPGAs, and safety-critical applications made DAC 2017 one of the most exciting conference years to date.

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Rethinking Car Design

Semiconductor Engineering logo

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Semiconductor Engineering

“There’s the systematic side of rigorous verification, and matching requirements, along with the random side,” said Dave Kelf, vice president of marketing at OneSpin Solutions. “The reliability overall is going to feed off from the safety side, and ISO is driving it. ISO 26262 is starting to address this much more competitive automotive market because the traditional safety markets, like the aeronautical space, don’t care if the pilot’s got an extra radio function. He doesn’t need it. So the competitive nature isn’t there. You can take a long time to change things. The new car manufacturers have to address the safety concerns, obviously, but they’re in a much more competitive environment than any of the ones before. The new standard has allowed them to build new capability more quickly, keep it to the safety standard, which is really critical, but allow them to compete in this environment today. This notion of safety, although it is well defined, is starting to encroach into all areas of semiconductors, and it’s all about how to drive the business but handle the reliability issues that these guys have to worry about as well — and not kill people.”

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Verification Unification | Experts at the Table, Part 3

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By Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering

Darbari: Completeness is a very interesting aspect of PS. If you can pre-validate all of the noisy inconsistencies in the specification, it makes a lot of sense. That is the hardest part of any verification and validation activity. No matter if you use UVM or formal, nobody knows how complete you are. Then you may have an inconsistent set of checkers or constraints, never mind the actual modeling and if in PS you have a way to capture the requirements which can be analyzed for inconsistencies, then that is a great feature which doesn’t exist anywhere else.

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The Safe Road Trip Thanks To Formal Verification

Semiconductor Engineering logo

By Dave Kelf, Semiconductor Engineering

Families in these driverless cars have the impossibly intricate electronic systems to thank for this welcome benefit. In turn, automotive suppliers have the indispensable ISO 26262 automotive standard and formal verification solutions to thank for ensuring their advanced technology is keeping passengers safe, no easy feat.

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Verification In The Cloud

Semiconductor Engineering logo

By Ed Sperling, Semiconductor Engineering

One of the more adventurous attempts to go into the cloud comes from OneSpin Solutions. “Formal verification is well suited to parallel execution,” said David Kelf, OneSpin’s vice president of marketing. “Unlike UVM-based stimulus for simulation, each assertion can operate reasonably independently, which means a group of assertions can be deployed on a series of machines.”

Kelf points out that with cloud-based services “there is no cost difference between parallel and serial operation, but parallel is much faster in wall-clock time. With the cloud you essentially have infinite machine capacity, so with the right business model parallel operation is a breeze. This is a huge win for the cloud that we have observed in practice, particularly in the verification space.”

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Safety Plus Security: Solutions and Methodologies | Part 2

By Ed Sperling and Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering

As more technology makes its way into safety-critical markets—and as more of those devices are connected to the Internet—security issues are beginning to merge with safety issues.

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“With safety, we are looking at single-fault effects, and for that we know what full coverage means,” said Ashish Darbari, director of product management for OneSpin Solutions. “We can analyze that every fault is detected using a number of mechanisms. But for security, attacks are not equivalent to single faults. How can we measure the effectiveness of the protections for security? If we could model and specify what the interactions need to be, what must happen, what must not happen, intentional versus unintentional, then you can come up with a good set of checks that could be specified. Security is more systematic analysis, but it will always be difficult to get a handle on completeness.”

In many cases, markets define what security means. “Security means different things to different people,” said Darbari. “To one person it is about illegal access to an unprivileged user to a CPU or part of memory. Firmware plays a big role here, as well, and a lot of bad firmware can cause these issues to manifest and allow access to the hardware. What is the security vulnerability model?”

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