Real Intent's functional verification solution for X-robust designs

SAN JOSE, USA: Real Intent Inc., the innovator in automating the intelligence of formal techniques for design verification, announced that its early functional verification product family Ascent now includes the first commercially available automated solution to ensure X-robust designs, available through the Ascent Path-Based Verification (PBV) product.

Explicit and implicit X sources (X assignments in RTL and non-resettable flops, respectively) in the designs can lead to many challenging issues for design verification, such as masking real design errors and causing RTL-to-netlist simulation mismatches.

Depending on coding styles, simulation results can be X-pessimistic which lead to unnecessary unknown values; or X-optimistic which results in known values when they should have been unknown. Design and verification teams write properties to trap Xs or instrument 2-value simulation with random initialization to avoid X ambiguity in order to detect design errors.

However, these approaches take considerable amount of manual and computational resources without offering the complete confidence of X robustness.

Ascent PBV offers a multi-faceted solution that addresses the problem through structural and formal analysis, as well as by augmenting simulation using Ascent SimPortal. Explicit and implicit X sources are automatically detected. Innovative formal techniques are used to prove X-optimism safe designs.

Ascent SimPortal can augment simulation to detect X-excitation, control X-pessimism, as well as eliminate X-optimism without loss of efficiency. It is the first automatic and comprehensive solution to detect and debug design errors and RTL/netlist simulation mismatches.

“Real Intent, as the leader in providing automatic functional verification solution for ASIC and FPGA designs, has been approached by many customers with issues related to X-handling in their designs,” commented Prakash Narain, President and CEO at Real Intent.

“Ascent PBV meets the needs and rises to the challenges by using multiple innovative technologies to ensure X-robust designs. We deliver verification confidence to our customers by turning their verification unknowns into the known.”

Ascent PBV is available worldwide in August.