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EDA market formalized? Design-automation market eyes formal verification By Brian Fuller, EE Times Anaheim, Calif. -- At this year's Design Automation Conference, Lucent's Bell Labs Design Automation (BLDA) operation gave out little penguin dolls after demonstrating its new formal-verification tools. That prompted some wags to crack: What does formal verification have in common with penguins? Answer: Neither will fly. But formal verification appeared to take wing at the 34th DAC, with new companies pushing their technologies, established ones staking out their territories and broad line vendors eagerly awaiting the right time to come to market. "After two and a half years of pushing the boulder up the hill, this show was about the boulder moving on its own," said Isadore Katz, vice president of marketing at Chrysalis Symbolic Design Inc. (North Billerica, Mass.), a startup that has done most of the missionary work for formal verification in the commercial market. The shift is manifold, and interest in the tools is far more intense than during the 1995 DAC in San Francisco, when companies such as Chrysalis and Lucent began talking about commercializing formal verification, and the technology was seen as a futuristic curiosity. Now, the verification problem that formal attempts to address is much more complex, outstripping the ability--at least the timely cost-efficient ability--of simulation and emulation techniques to handle the problem alone. In addition, DAC 1997 will be seen as the conference at which model checking, the Holy Grail of formal verification, emerged. Equivalency checking has helped the market get its sea legs, but model-checking tools promise to tackle much more significant verification problems down the road. The interest among potential users and the evolution of some of the tools suggest that this technology, once viewed by some as an EDA parlor trick, is on the verge of breaking out into a viable commercial market. In the next three years, market-research firm Dataquest forecasts, the market--currently at $11 million in annual sales, most of that single-seat experimental purchases--will triple. Still, the road there is fraught with peril. For one thing, the tools require an overhaul of verification methodology, which to date has consisted of specification, RTL description, simulation and reiteration loops. The tools are expensive ($100,000 to $200,000) and require users to learn a different design language and understand concepts of mathematical formal proofs. "Formal is rocket science," one observer said. "They give out PhDs to use these things." On top of that, competitive efforts are pushing to speed up simulation, whose sluggishness created interest in formal verification. (A dozen new simulators or simulation companies debuted at this year's DAC.) Finally, there is the specter--to paraphrase a comment once made about design automation in general--of too many dogs feeding from one bowl. Within the next two years, nine companies could be fighting in a segment that may be able to support no more than three vendors; this in a business segment with long sales cycles. (Next article.)
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