Verification Leader TransEDA Launches VN-Property DX Dynamic Property Checker

Newest Component of Verification Navigator Environment Speeds Complex System Verification

LOS GATOS, Calif. - March 4, 2002 - TransEDA®, the leader in ready-to-use verification solutions for electronic designs, today introduced VN-Property DX[tm], a dynamic property checker that verifies properties during system simulation. It accelerates verification of complex systems by measuring the effectiveness of simulation against design-specific properties.

VN-Property DX is the newest addition to the company's Verification Navigator® integrated design verification environment, which gives a unified view of verification completeness for complex system-on-chip (SoC), application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) designs. The new product enables engineers to answer the question, "Is my design fully verified?" by determining if specific verification requirements have been satisfied during simulation. It also provides property coverage as a metric to direct the verification effort and determine when to stop.

VN-Property DX enables property checking during any simulation, independent of the test generation approach used. This enables engineers to preserve investments in existing infrastructure. VN-Property DX also allows complex properties to be checked at the system level, eliminating the state explosion problem found with formal verification tools.

"TransEDA's VN-Property DX is the first in a planned series of tools that use properties to unite formal verification with simulation, as well as block-level with system-level verification," said Tom Borgstrom, vice president of marketing at TransEDA. "The product enables engineers to comprehensively, independently, and objectively confirm that they've fully verified the behavior of their designs. Together with code and finite state machine (FSM) coverage analysis, dynamic property checking provides a powerful means to improve the efficiency and speed the closure of the verification process."

Bridging the Gap Between Formal Verification and Simulation

"VN-Property DX represents an innovative new vision for design verification, helping to bridge the gap between formal verification and simulation," said Thomas W. Albrecht, director, Chips, Electronics & Software Design Services at Program and System Engineering, Siemens Austria. "We found that it was much easier to develop properties in Perl than it was to write equivalent checkers in VHDL. TransEDA's pre-defined property libraries for standard interfaces like PCI make property development even faster."

A Ready-to-Use Solution for Assuring Complete Verification

VN-Property DX enables arbitrarily complex design scenarios to be checked quickly without the need to write complicated HDL checkers or assertions. Features of VN-Property DX include:

• Dynamic Property Checking: VN-Property DX checks for both expected and prohibited behavior and allows new properties to be added and checked, even after simulation. It identifies violations of properties describing prohibited behavior, and increases users? confidence in property validity by measuring the percentage of expected behaviors observed during simulation.
• Pre-Defined Property Libraries: Engineers can choose pre-defined, validated property libraries from TransEDA. A PCI property library is available now; an AMBA AHB/APB property library will be available in the second quarter of 2002. Additional property libraries will be released throughout the year.
• User-Defined Properties: Engineers and IP developers can create their own properties in industry-standard Perl syntax. The use of Perl for defining properties enables users who understand the popular language to start writing properties without a long learning curve. Properties are HDL-neutral and independent from design files, facilitating future re-use. In addition, TransEDA is committed to open industry standards, and will add support for the industry standard property language now being defined by Accellera.
• Flexibility: VN-Property DX is ready to use in existing verification flows, and supports all leading Verilog, VHDL, and dual-language simulators. The tool works with all test generation techniques and can serve as an independent check of verification completeness. It can be used at any stage of the design integration process, from block level to system level.

Use of Dynamic Property Checking in IP-Based Designs

VN-Property DX enables a new approach for verification of intellectual property (IP) based designs. Many leading designs consist of a mix of pre-verified IP cores from both internal and external sources. This design style introduces new verification challenges such as validating interface assumptions between blocks and ensuring that all behaviors, including those specific to external IP cores, have been simulated and verified. The challenge is compounded by the fact that the IP user or system integrator often doesn't understand the detailed behavior of all the cores in the design.

In this verification methodology, IP developers would deliver properties describing key IP behaviors and interface assumptions. The IP integrator would then use this collection of properties to ensure that all critical behaviors were verified during simulation and that all interface assumptions were confirmed. The IP integrator would then be able to fully verify the design and quickly track down interface bugs without having a detailed understanding of each core. Properties help bridge the gap between IP developer and IP integrator. TransEDA will work with leading IP developers to facilitate creation and distribution of properties compatible with VN-Property DX.

"Verified functional quality and fast integration are key points when talking about integrating of third party IPs into large SoCs", said Thomas Hoetzel, COO of sci-worx, a leading IP developer. "Sci-worx is streamlining its IP verification environment to enable customers to fully verify the IP's integration and behavior while speeding up the integration process by looking at the IP as a black box with a set of functions. TransEDA's VN-Property DX dynamic property checker is expected to significantly contribute towards such an integrated SoC verification solution."

About Verification Navigator

TransEDA's Verification Navigator integrated design verification environment features tools that enable IC designers to manage the verification process and shorten verification time. In addition to VN-Property DX, Verification Navigator includes VN-Check[tm] configurable HDL checker, VN-Cover[tm] coverage analysis, VN-Optimize[tm] test suite analysis, and VN-Control[tm] application-specific test automation. Verification Navigator supports all leading Verilog, VHDL, and dual-language simulators and is available on the Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, Windows NT, and Windows 2000 platforms.

Contacts:
TransEDA - Tom Borgstrom, (408) 907-2225; tom.borgstrom@transeda.com.
PentaCom - Sharon Graves, +44 1242 525205, sharon.graves@btinternet.com.
Armstrong Kendall, Inc. - Jen Bernier, (408) 975-9863, jen@akipr.com.