This document discusses how to break the formal verification scalability barrier. It outlines that verification complexity increases exponentially with design size and complexity. Existing dynamic verification methods are unable to close this verification gap. The document then presents several perspectives and approaches for achieving scalability in formal verification. These include making verification interactive, enabling parallelism through multithreading and distributed computing, and using techniques like automatic abstraction and state space tunneling to manage proof capacity for large designs.

1. How do we break the Formal Verification Scalability Barrier ? Ziyad Hanna Jasper Design Automation May 4, 2011 May 4, 2011

2. Jasper Design Automation Gothenburg, Sweden EDA leader of formal technologies in delivering targeted ROI solutions for the design and verification Mountain View, CA Haifa, Israel Belo Horizonte, Brazil HP

3. Design and Verification Activities … Spec development OS bring up Mask development Benchmarking Heat Test planning Reliability Verification RTL Development Unit testing Circuit marginality verification Power estimation Simulation Coverage Analysis Noise Analysis Power Verification How to cope with all of this ? Assertion writing Synthesis Device Driver development RC estimation and verification Formal verification Floor Planning Timing Analysis Protocol Checking Process development Custom block design Equivalence Checking Architecture Verification Library Design Connectivity verification Software Development Emulation Performance Verification Layout FPGA Fracture Verification Full chip integration Firmware Post –si Debug & Validation High Level Synthesis

4. Problem Statement Verification complexity increases at an exponential rate Costly labor and IT resources Hard to predict the quality and TTM Existing dynamic verification methods are unable to close the verification gap Logic escapes are still cannot be avoided Post-Silicon validation Design problem, or Verification problem, or both ?

5. Formal Technology Comes of Age EDAC Market Statistics Service (MSS) aggregates and reports revenue growth by tool category Formal Property Checking category had 3rd fastest-growing revenue in EDA/IP (latest MSS report Q3’10)

6. Early Formal Tools Required Formal PhD Users What We’ve Learned About the Market Value Show Deployability Raise Expectations Effort Big EDA Vendors’ Formal Tools Reduced Effort, Sacrificed Value

7. Scalability – Customers Perspectives Handle bigger and more complex designs From small blocks, units, clusters, CPU to systems Coping with exponential design complexity Solve hard problems in design and verification Spectrum of applications beyond model checking Handle emerging design styles FF/Latch based designs, async, clock glitches, CDC … Enable project level multiuser/parallel engineering/reuse and collaboration methodologies Scale economically with high utilization of licenses

9. Parallel: multithreading, computer clusters, farms and clouds

10. Elastic: Dynamic verification tasks, grow and shrink on-the-fly

11. Programmable: API for creating/expanding capabilities

13. Parallel: multithreading, computer clusters, farms and clouds

14. Elastic: Dynamic verification tasks, grow and shrink on-the-fly

15. Programmable: API for creating/expanding capabilities

18. Trace concatenation

19. Auto-explorationConfigurations stack manager Pushes & pops constraints Modifies netlist on-the-fly

21. Parallel: multithreading, computer clusters, farms and clouds

22. Elastic: Dynamic verification tasks, grow and shrink on-the-fly

23. Programmable: API for creating/expanding capabilities

25. Managing Proof Capacity – Automatic Abstraction CEX? Model Checking at depth k cycles done No CEX? Automatic Abstraction Learning, Increase k, refinement True? Model Checking done False?

26. Managing Proof Capacity – Interactive Abstraction Design Tunneling – formal analysis guided expansion algorithms Interactive State Space Tunneling Design Abstraction and Proof Accelerators

27. Performance Evolution (on SUN OPENSPARC Design) Phase-1 Phase-2 Phase-3 Emerging hardware gives 2X speedup Parallel Proofs boost the performance by additional 10X Engine technology boost the proofs by additional ~4X

29. Parallel: multithreading, computer clusters, farms and clouds

30. Elastic: Dynamic verification tasks, grow and shrink on-the-fly

31. Programmable: API for creating/expanding capabilities

33. Seamless tracking & reporting✖ P0 P1 P2 P3 P9 P10 P11 ✔ ✔ ✔ ✖ P4 ✖ P5 Throughput ✖ P6 ✔ P7 ✔ P8 ✔ ✔ ✔ ✖ P13 Capacity

36. Parallel: multithreading, computer clusters, farms and clouds

37. Elastic: Dynamic verification tasks, grow and shrink on-the-fly

38. Programmable: API for creating/expanding capabilities

40. Conclusions Scalability is a multi-dimensional goal and requires a holistic approach to achieve it Scalability from user perspective is a key enabler for making formal key technology to deploy With scalability in mind, formal technology has come of age

41. Thank You