About two years ago, we looked at a new product from SpringSoft, Certitude, inherited through the acquisition of Certess. SpringSoft has just announced some improvements to the product.

As a quick reminder, Certitude performs what SpringSoft calls “functional qualification.” That fundamentally means that it looks for untestable pieces of your design by inserting bugs and seeing if the bugs can be detected.

Most of the improvements have to do with improving the specificity and relevance of what the analysis returns. First, they’ve tuned some of the kinds of errors they inject to align with the typical kinds of faults that might be found in an SoC. Second, they correlate results in a manner that eliminates a multitude of “hits” that might all relate to the same issue. This reduces the amount of “noise” in the results, making it easier to sift through. Third, results are ranked based on likely impact so that the most important issues can be addressed first.

They’re also introducing a new use mode intended for checking out the testbench setup. The focus of this is to prove out the checkers early on while the tests are still being written.

More info in their press release…