Certitude
Introducing Functional Qualification
Until now there has been no objective measure of the quality of a functional verification environment. As a result, when a design is passing all the tests in the verification environment, it has not been possible to know whether the design under verification is correct, and may be safely taped-out, or whether the verification environment is just incapable of finding any bugs that may still remain.
Certitude delivers functional qualification: a breakthrough technology which provides the ability to objectively measure the quality of a verification environment and identify which parts of the environment need to be improved. It answers the question:
"If there was a bug in the design, could your verification find it?"
Current coverage tools can provide some information about whether the verification environment can activate a bug in the design, but they do not give any visibility on whether the bug can propagate to an observable location or whether it can be detected.
Certitude provides this visibility.
How It Works
Certitude is a new, patent-pending technology that combines mutation-based techniques and static analysis to measure and help improve all aspects of quality for HDL simulation-based functional verification. Mutation-based analysis has been an active topic of research in the area of software validation for many years and has proven to be very effective to evaluate the effectiveness of a given software validation approach.
Certitude is the first industrial implementation of mutation-based analysis.
Certitude has two use modes: a metric mode that can be used to objectively measure the quality of a verification environment and a verification improvement mode that can be used to evaluate IP blocks and the connectivity between blocks for SoC design.
Certitude Metric Mode
Certitude's metric is the only objective measure of functional verification quality. It can be used to measure the verification quality of internal blocks or third party IP, allowing high confidence IP exchange, better SoC predictability and allocation of resources where they will be most effective. The Certitude metric is a global score that evaluates the overall quality of a functional verification environment. Certitude also provides separate scores for activation, propagation and detection.
Certitude Verification Improvement Mode
In this mode Certitude identifies weaknesses and bugs caused by incomplete or missing checkers and test scenarios. Certitude's HTML report gives complete and flexible access to all results of the analysis.
This mode is used to check the quality of the verification within the constituent blocks. It also can be used to check the connectivity between blocks for SoC integration. In the latter case, Certitude induces faults only in the connections between the constituent blocks of the system.
Integration of Certitude
Certitude is tightly integrated with the main industry simulators: Mentor ModelSim, Cadence NC-Sim and Synopsys VCS and is easy to integrate into existing functional verification flows. It is fully compatible with all up-to-date verification methodologies such as random-based stimulus generation and PSL assertions; it can be used with any verification environment. Certitude does not require modifications to the organization and execution of the user's existing verification environment.
Platform/Language Support
- Certitude supports Linux RedHat (from 7.3 onwards) and Solaris 8, 9 and 10.
- Licensing using Macrovision FLEXlm (from version 10.8).
- Certitude supports any type of digital design written in VHDL or Verilog or mixed VHDL/Verilog.
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