It’s taken a few decades for formal verification to expand beyond a tool reserved for the select few with a Ph.D. to become a mainstream verification solution. In recent years, formal adoption has compounded due to the following trends:

• Ever-increasing design complexity affecting verification closure, making formal verification a must-have strategy in the overall verification flow;
• Formal applications targeting well-defined domains do not require formal expertise, such as reachability analysis, connectivity checking, control register verification, and X-propagation;
• Advanced formal applications, such as functional safety, security, low power, are expanding usage to critical design and verification problems;
• The role of machine learning to increase performance and capacity of the formal engines enabling its use for larger and highly complex designs;
• Leveraging the cloud to scale the use of formal methods across thousands of CPU cores.

Formal verification is like a diamond in the rough with exceptional potential to become as widely used as functional simulation. In this tutorial, attendees will learn about the advanced formal applications and hear first-hand what lies ahead, such as:

• Solving complexity challenges using advanced formal techniques
• Using formal methods to detect security leak at the SoC level
• The advantage to using formal for architectural verification
• Verifying the most complex datapath blocks, such as wide floating point math functions
• The need for model checking C/C++ models
• And more …

Attendees will walk away with a comprehensive understanding of advanced formal technologies and how to apply them across IP/block, subsystem, and SoCs.

Ravindra Aneja