2019-09-19
By Tom Anderson, Technical Marketing, OneSpin
Formal verification traditionally has been regarded as an advanced technique for experts to thoroughly verify individual blocks of logic, or perhaps small clusters of blocks. The appeal of formal techniques is the exhaustive analysis of all possible behavior for the design being verified. This stands in sharp contrast to simulation, which exercises only a tiny fraction of possible behavior by running specific tests. If no test triggers a design bug, the bug will not be found. If the bug is triggered but no change in results is observed, the bug will not be found. Given a sufficiently robust set of properties to describe intended behavior, formal tools can not only find all bugs but also prove that there are no more bugs to be found.