German firm design firm OneSpin Solutions is offering on the market an electronic system verification technology which has been developed at Infineon and Siemens.

The static formal verification solution, called OneSpin 360 Module Verifier (360 MV), can be used to verify peripherals, processors and processor-based subsystems of up to a few hundred thousand lines of code.

Infineon Technologies used the technology to verify the PPv2 protocol processor, including its advanced context switching IP.  “This verification approach assured that the complete functionality of the PPv2 was covered and bug escape routes blocked. Moreover, the total verification effort was about 40% less than that in a previous, simulation-based project,” said Alexander Haggenmiller, director intellectual property and re-use at the comms business group at Infineon.

The tool allows designers to verify functional compliance between the transaction and register transfer (RT) levels to reduce risk in the reuse of IP components, especially processor cores. An automatically checked termination criterion can eliminate the regression testing that merely estimates achieved quality levels, said the firm.
 
“The 360 MV methodology leapfrogs coverage-based bug-hunting approaches – used by both simulation and other formal tools – in which design teams never can be certain what quality level has been achieved. It determines beyond doubt that verification is completed,” said One Spin.

Siemens used the technology in the verification of various designs, including two 4-million-gate SoC designs with multiple re-use blocks.