Cadence updates Incisive with formal, CRV, wreal additions

By Chris Edwards |  No Comments  |  Posted: January 14, 2014
Topics/Categories: Blog - EDA  |  Tags: , , , , ,  | Organizations:

Cadence Design Systems has updated its Incisive functional-verification platform to include a new formal-verification engine for Incisive Formal Verifier, a constraints engine for the Enterprise Simulator, speedups for X-propagation checks and additional support for IEEE 1800-2012 real-number modeling.

To speed up X propagation checks, Incisive Enterprise Simulator mimics gate operation at the RTL level and looks for structures that can often create X-propagation issues. The tool will create assertions that can be add to X-propagation RTL simulation to monitor the X values generated.

The Trident formal engine added to Formal Verifier provides word-level and memory abstractions that are designed to speed up checks that use those structure by up to 20-fold.

The constraints engine sits between the two existing engines used by the simulation platform to reduce the overhead of having a set of constraints outgrow the simple, but fast engine. Heuristics determine whether a constraints set is handled by the existing complex-constraints engine or the new, medium-complexity engine. Depending on the constraints involved, performance on constraints solving can increase by up to 10x, according to Cadence.

Real-value and UPF additions

The enhancements to the wreal modeling support in the Digital Mixed Signal option of Incisive Enterprise Simulator include support for the superposition of analog signals where two drivers are acting on a single wire. Following the IEEE 1800 standard, the resolution of how two analog waveforms combine is handled through user-defined functions, allowing this type of calculation to move from a comparatively slow analog solver into the digital simulator. The changes expand the range of analog modeling techniques that can be handled in a digital simulator.

For UPF design flows, Cadence has added power-supply network visualization to the Incisive environment. The feature imports the text-based power-supply descriptions, which may be spread across a large number of definition files, and converts them into a schematic view accessed from the debug tool, which should make it easier to spot opens, shorts and other misconnections.

For code coverage-driven design, Cadence has added an exclusion mechanism that includes support for user comments. The idea is to make it easier to prioritize checks on unreachable code in conjunction with the the unreachability verification app in 13.2. Typically, verification engineers run the app to identify unreachable code who then make the determination of whether the code is unreachable because of a bug that needs to be fixed or can be signed off. If the latter, it can be added to a list of exclusions, so that the code is not included in future code-coverage analyses, along with the reason why.

Cadence describes these and some other features in a support document for Incisive 13.2.

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