0-In Introduces Breakthrough Automatic Verification of Metastability Effects

Archer Verification™ system verifies every functional effect of clock-domain crossing metastability

SAN JOSE, Calif. - May 17, 2004 - Today 0-In Design Automation, the Assertion-Based Verification Company, announced a new product in its Archer Verification™ system incorporating breakthrough technology that automates the verification of all possible clock-domain crossing (CDC) metastability effects (FX) in system-on-chip (SoC) and ASIC designs. This pioneering product, named CDC-FX, gives design and verification teams a push-button methodology for determining whether variable-length cycle delays (jitter) of signals crossing clock domains may cause functional defects in their register-transfer level (RTL) designs.

Today, many design teams manually enforce design styles and methodologies to prevent functional bugs arising from metastability effects. The CDC-FX addition to 0-In's Archer Verification system automates this process and detects all possible metastability effect errors, leading to more thorough verification in less time. The CDC-FX capability is unique to 0-In and complements existing CDC verification features in the Archer Verification system for clock synchronization checking and CDC protocol checking.

"CDC-FX is part of our continuing effort to automate and provide complete solutions for the most critical verification tasks facing our customers," said Steve White, president and CEO of 0-In. "This is another example of how the engineered combination of simulation and exhaustive formal verification techniques yields 10x verification productivity gains."

CDC-FX Synthesizes Generators that Intelligently Inject Metastability Effects
CDC-FX automatically synthesizes a metastability effect generator into a RTL description of a design. The generator introduces metastability effects by analyzing simulation and intelligently injecting signal errors whenever metastability may arise - at every clock-domain crossing in the design, whether synchronized or not. The injected metastability errors stress the design during simulation of the original RTL description using existing testbenches and existing end-to-end checks which exposes functional and performance defects. Since no additional checking specific to CDC is required, users can start using CDC-FX with very little effort.

Formal Verification Exhaustively Analyzes Metastability Effects
As well as using CDC-FX to find functional and performance defects, users can apply the exhaustive static and dynamic formal verification capabilities of the Archer Verification system to the RTL description with the metastability generator to thoroughly analyze all possible metastability errors. Archer Verification's formal analysis finds design bugs caused by jitter and determines the minimum amount of jitter needed to demonstrate such bugs. The combination of simulation, formal verification and CDC-FX reduces the time needed to reach closure on the critical verification task of preventing functional bugs being introduced into the design by jitter.

For further technical information, please refer to the paper, "Formally verifying clock domain crossing jitter using assertion-based verification," by Tai Ly, Neil Hand and Chris Kwok, published in proceedings of the Design and Verification Conference (DVCon), March 2004.

New Archer Product Delivers Complete CDC Verification Solution
For new customers focused on solving their CDC verification problems, the Archer Verification system has been broadened to include Archer-CDC, a complete package that includes CDC-FX, clock synchronization checking, CDC protocol checking (static and dynamic) and CDC reconvergence checking. Existing customers can receive the same capabilities by purchasing CDC-FX as an add-on to Archer-CDV.

Pricing and Availability
North American list price for Archer-CDC is $100,000; CDC-FX add-on to the Archer-CDV product is $50,000. Archer-CDC and CDC-FX will be demonstrated in Booth #3243 at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Diego, June 7-11, and will ship to beta customers starting in Q3 of 2004.

About 0-In
0-In Design Automation, Inc. (pronounced "zero-in") develops and supports functional verification products that help verify multi-million gate application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and system-on-chip (SoC) designs. The company delivers a comprehensive assertion-based verification (ABV) solution built on industry standards that provides value throughout the design and verification cycle - from the block level to the chip and system levels. Twelve of the 15 largest electronics companies have adopted 0-In tools and methodologies in their integrated circuit (IC) design verification flows. 0-In was founded in 1996 and is based in San Jose, Calif. For more information, see http://www.0-in.com.

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