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| Design and IP leverage is constituted by five different categories: |
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- Design exploration and comprehension of designs: Traditional simulation is limited for exploration and comprehension of an unfamiliar design, since the user is required to figure out how to trigger a scenario by manipulating the inputs. Formal verification technology applied to scenarios being investigated, along with visualization, advanced waveform generation and debugging features, provides an ideal environment to explore and comprehend a design.
- Targeted configuration analysis: A reusable design is typically highly configurable, and yet, it is difficult to verify the design for all configurable options. Formal verification applied with visualization technology can generate and annotate complex waveforms with the exercised behaviors, answering questions like "How do I program the design into the target state?" and "What target state will the design gets into if I execute this programming sequence?"
- Modifying existing designs for design reuse efficiency: Leveraging an existing IP block often involves some changes and complete re-verification, reducing reuse efficiency. Focused re-verification only of the features related to the modification made to the RTL is desirable.
- Promoting knowledge transfer and delivery: A static document is difficult to keep up-to-date as the design evolves, and waveforms captured in the screenshots may not reflect end user needs. Some formal-based solutions capture design knowledge in an executable specification with the ability to regenerate, annotate, and customize waveforms from the latest RTL.
- Design and IP leverage and deployment: Designers’ time is expensive, yet design verification and design reuses often relies on RTL knowledge only found in the head of the original designer. Since the RTL is the authority of what it can and cannot do, tools can extract the answer to any question directly from the RTL, instead of letting the original designer answer the same questions over and over again for multiple design projects reusing the same block.
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