Averant's Property Verification Gears up for Mainstream

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 8, 2002--Averant, Inc. a leading provider of static functional verification and property checking software for RTL level Verilog and VHDL designs, today announced that Solidify(TM), its flagship functional verification product has been put into production use by more than 27 companies worldwide. Averant's customers include leading companies designing ICs, ASICs, and FPGAs for telecommunication, networking, and data processing applications.

Solidify's property verification solution has been successfully adopted by these customers to find and fix functional errors early in the design cycle and significantly reducing the time to verify while increasing the quality of verification.

Solidify's earliest success came through Averant's collaboration with designers and verification engineers at companies like Cisco Systems, Compaq Computer, Nvidia, UltimateTV, Lucent, Hitachi and Fujitsu. RTL blocks that could not be thoroughly verified using simulation were exhaustively verified using Solidify.

"We determined it is crucially important to accelerate functional verification to keep our aggressive projects on schedule. We expect that by using Solidify we will not only shorten our verification schedules, but also improve our quality of results," said Chris Malachowsky, Vice President of Engineering, NVIDIA. "Rising levels of integration significantly increases the likelihood a bug hiding in a block may not be found. These bugs are difficult to find and costly to fix at the chip-level. The use of Solidify's static verification, at the block-level before integration, will enable us to find corner cases that were previously too difficult or too time-consuming to reach".

"Compaq has adopted a new methodology called static functional verification to attack difficult problems that demand significant design process bandwidth and are costly," Said Paul Rawlins, Senior Technical Staff, Compaq Computer. "Static functional verification allows a designer to completely verify the operation of a design without having to establish a verification testbench or develop simulation vector patterns. Instead, static functional verification uses a set of properties that describe the behavior of the design to prove proper functionality using formal verification techniques."

In Japan, Solidify was put in a widespread use. Averant's exclusive distribution relationship with SC Hightech has led to a rapid market acceptance. Within 6 months of introduction, Solidify was evaluated and purchased by Hitachi, Fujitsu, Toshiba, NEC, Matsushita, EPSON, and STARC. These companies utilize Solidify extensively and have discovered that Solidify improves design quality while reducing time-to-market.

"Solidify uses a Verilog-like property language, making it is easy for designers to understand and write properties," said Toshiyuki Igarashi, Manager for Fujitsu's MCU Technology Dept. System Micro Division. "We are developing a methodology to write effective properties and will broadly adopt this methodology for our MCU products in various applications. We aim to eliminate time-consuming vector based logic simulation for many design blocks, using Solidify to achieve high quality verification in a short time."

Solidify was also purchased by new and upcoming networking and telecommunication start-ups like Tau Networks, Lynx Photonic Networks, Lenslet Labs, and Terago Communication where it has proved to be a productive verification solution that provides a competitive advantage.

"Formal verification's main strength is that unlike simulation, it does not depend on the probability of reaching any given scenario. If the scenario can occur, however infrequently, formal verification will find it," said Elchanan Rappaport, Logic Development Manager, Lynx Photonic Networks. "This makes the difference for complex systems where the number of degrees of freedom makes it impossible to design a simulation environment which will not miss certain combinations. In fact, we have found a number of just such bugs in designs we had thought were exhaustively simulated, by using Solidify."

Enhanced usability, increased performance, quick debugging capacities, and extensions to Solidify's property language prompted ARM, LSI Logic, AMD, Agilent, Qlogic, Tellabs, and other major semiconductor and networking companies to purchase Solidify. Combined with system-level simulation and other traditional verification methods, these companies use Solidify to formally verify designs as early as possible and prior to integration.

"Using Solidify, the unit-level verification of a wireless networking product is drastically reduced to half," said Rex Hsueh, a project lead at AMD wireless networking group. "Solidify surprisingly uncovered several architecture corner case bugs that could have turned into potential system bugs. Design properties are easy to create and maintain, and Solidify provides quick feedback when properties fail."

"ARM uses many different validation techniques, including formal verification, to ensure high quality CPU cores. The exhaustive nature of formal verification makes it ideal for verifying every possible corner case -- essential for configurable IP that's used by many customers in a variety of environments," said Mike Turpin, Principal Validation Engineer at ARM. "We've recently had success with the Solidify property checker from Averant, using its verilog-like property language to find and fix bugs in CPU blocks and interfaces. It can also extract a few standard properties directly from the RTL, allowing certain bugs to be found quickly and efficiently."

"EDA industry is experiencing a tremendous growth by creating new design and verification technologies to benefit a broad range of applications," said Behrooz Zahiri, vice president of Marketing for Averant. "We're extremely pleased with the diversity of customers using Solidify and the breadth of verification problems solved by Solidify. We have learned from each customer, and continuous improvements have made Solidify a practical functional verification tool for today's VHDL and Verilog designs."

About Averant

Averant, Inc., founded in 1997, is a privately held EDA company leading the emerging market for static functional verification and property checking. Averant develops, sells, and supports worldwide Solidify, a software tool that delivers unprecedented performance in verification of HDL designs. Solidify improves verification productivity and design quality while reducing time-to-market and schedule risk. For more information, visit Averant's web site at www.averant.com, or contact by email at info@averant.com or by phone at 408/844-8440.

     Averant, Inc.
     Behrooz Zahiri, 408/981-4466
     bzahiri@averant.com