Verification Closure Tool Watches Over Assertions

July 21, 2005

While assertions and assertion-based verification (ABV) help solve many problems, they also spawn new challenges. How do you write them? Did they cover the entire design? And when is verification complete? TransEDA's Assertain is billed as a "ver

David Maliniak

TransEDA's Assertain is billed as a "verification closure-management tool." But it's also a way to derive metrics that can tell users when their verification process is truly complete. Assertain monitors, measures, and manages the verification process in one integrated environment. It brings together rule, protocol, and assertion checking; code and assertion coverage; design and assertion coverability analysis; and test grading and optimization, which is linked to specification coverage.

The tool, which fits seamlessly into established verification flows, uses comprehensive assertion-coverage metrics such as structural, step, and variable coverage. Cross-linked results from assertion coverage and code coverage are combined in a unified database that provides a clear view of verification progress.

In addition, TransEDA's formal engine augments the tool's integrated rule-checking engine with formal verification of design-consistency rules, such as bus contention and high-impedance conditions, finite-state-machine deadlock and livelock, array out-of-bounds, and others.

Available on Solaris and Linux platforms, Assertain starts from $30,000 for a perpetual license.

TransEDA www.transeda.com

About the Author

David Maliniak | MWRF Executive Editor

In his long career in the B2B electronics-industry media, David Maliniak has held editorial roles as both generalist and specialist. As Components Editor and, later, as Editor in Chief of EE Product News, David gained breadth of experience in covering the industry at large. In serving as EDA/Test and Measurement Technology Editor at Electronic Design, he developed deep insight into those complex areas of technology. Most recently, David worked in technical marketing communications at Teledyne LeCroy. David earned a B.A. in journalism at New York University.