Incisive Enterprise Verifier for Everyone!

Last week Cadence announced a new product called Incisive Enterprise Verifier (IEV) that combines simulation and formal technologies in unique and interesting ways. I am very excited about IEV for two good reasons. The first is simply that it's the product I've been most involved with during my time at Cadence, so I have a personal stake in its success. The bigger reason is my vision that IEV will be the primary tool on the desktop of every design and verification engineer in your company.

That's a bold statement, even coming from a Marketing guy. But I absolutely think that IEV has this potential. Why? Well, IEV has all industry-leading features found in our very successful Incisive Formal Verifier, so you can run formal analysis on fresh RTL code to find bugs, check your design against your assertions, and even hit assertion coverage points to see how well you're exercising your design. But as every formal user knows, on large or complex blocks pure formal analysis may not always give 100% results. 

That's where the unique technology blends of IEV come into play. You can take the exact same assertions used with formal and automatically generate simulation stimulus to exercise large designs beyond the range of pure formal. You can pick interesting points in this simulation and perform additional formal runs to find more bugs and hit more covers, "ping-ponging" between simulation and formal if you so desire. You can even use formal to hit an interesting point, such as a cover, and kick off simulation from there.

You can do all this very early in the design process, before any testbench is available. When your testbench is ready, whether it's a simple directed-test setup or a complete constrained-random, metric-driven OVM environment, you can run it with IEV. Yes, IEV also has all the industry-leading features found in our very successful Incisive Enterprise Simulator. If you're mostly a simulation user, you can start with a testbench, and then add in some formal runs using the same assertions you've been simulating to exercise your design more thoroughly.

So what else do you need on your desktop? IEV includes RTL linting, intuituve debug features, verification planning, regression management, tracking of unified verification metrics, example designs and verification environments, testbench simulation, formal analysis, and unique combinations of these technologies. Give every design and verification engineer a copy of IEV, and if you run both simulation and formal on your server farms put IEV there as well. Add VIP Portfolio licenses for your standard protocols, buy Incisive Enterprise Manager for your project leads, and go verify your chip!

Tom A.

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