Thought Leadership

Static Verification

By Ping Yeung

After spending years verifying ASICs with dynamic simulation, I started working on static verification 10 years ago in a startup called 0-In Design Automation. I firmly believe that static verification can complement dynamic simulation. Static verification uses synthesis and formal technologies to find bugs in the design. It does not rely on simulation stimulus. You do not need to exercise the bugs, propagate the results, and check the outputs to detect them.

Static verification includes RTL lint, static checks, formal checks, automated and assertion-based formal property checking. To read more on static verification, you can take a look at my white paper: Getting Started With Static Verification. If you are interested in formal methods, you can take a look at Harry Foster’s white paper: Why Now for Formal Property Checking. Both can be found in the Knowledge Center of DAC.com.

In the future, we are going to talk about individual static verification technologies and its application in areas such as RTL verification, clock domain crossing verification, low power verification, timing constraint verification, etc. Your feedback and comments are most welcome.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/verificationhorizons/2010/06/07/static-verification/