MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. — September 12, 2012 — Formal verification services provider Oski Technology (www.oskitech.com) is celebrating success after beating the 72-hour clock in the Oski Live Verification Challenge held during this year’s Design Automation Conference (DAC) in June.
“We showed that formal verification is a proven technology,” affirms Vigyan Singhal, Oski’s president and chief executive officer, whose team successfully delivered formal verification results on a new NVIDIA design in less than three days. “This was an ambitious project and one that hasn’t been attempted before at DAC, but we were confident in our abilities and the formal verification methodology.”
The Oski team received a register transfer level (RTL) design it hadn’t seen before from NVIDIA at 5 p.m. Sunday, June 3, hours before DAC officially began, and built an end-to-end formal testbench in less than 72 hours. DAC attendees followed the action on a webcam feed at the Oski booth and through regular Twitter updates.
Announced in March, the Oski Verification Challenge invited design teams to provide an RTL design of any type, including legacy design, in any design phase. NVIDIA’s design was selected, though not shared with Oski until the challenge began, though the two companies worked together to determine what information would be most suitable for a summary report. The design was an ARM-based design for use in the NVIDIA Tegra product line.
The NVIDIA team received detailed verification results delivered at 5 p.m. Wednesday, June 6, including the end-to-end formal testbench, and four formerly undetected corner-case bugs. Additionally, the Oski Verification Challenge team wrote and identified end-to-end checkers, some of which were passing.
Anshu Nadkarni, NVIDIA’s director of hardware engineering, notes: “I believed something would come out of the formal verification challenge, but the result exceeded my expectations. The end-to-end verification is extremely valuable for us. We have tight deadlines and aggressive schedules. The micro-architecture is detailed, making it hard to come up with a comprehensive verification plan without understanding it. What Oski Technology was able to achieve is phenomenal.”
To learn more about the Oski Verification Challenge, visit:
http://oskitech.com/2012/09/oski-challengewrap-up-video/
About Oski Technology
Oski Technology is a formal verification services company with expertise in deploying formal verification on complex, digital designs. Oski Technology has developed a unique formal verification methodology and Oski Abstraction Models to solve challenging capacity problems with formal verification. Its formal methods bring a higher level of productivity than traditional simulation and formal verification approaches. Oski Technology, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with a design center in India, has built a team of the world’s foremost experts in formal verification. More information about Oski Technology can be found at: www.oskitech.com.
