It didn't surprise me when I saw Steve Golson's Synopsys Formality vs. Avanti Chrysalis letter in ESNUG 400. After all, Synopsys had just bought Avanti, so it was natural to ask what might happen to each company's equivalency-checking tools.

Nor was I surprised when Maremanda Rao of Ample Communication wrote about migrating from Chrysalis to Formality, nor when consultant Howard Landman wrote that he liked Verplex over Formality.

The surprise came when Mahesh Siddappa of Atmel wrote: "Thanks for the comparison of Formality and Chrysalis in ESNUG 400. I wonder if any user of both Mentor's FormalPro and Formality has published such a report."

For years, the market has been a longstanding battle between Verplex and Formality. Those two together easily own 90 percent of the equivalency-checking market. What's FormalPro from Mentor doing here?

I saw one answer the following week in ESNUG 403. "We also used to use Formality, but got sick of the bugs and decided to dump it in favor of something else. We tried out both Verplex Tuxedo and Mentor FormalPro," wrote Russ Petersen of Scientific-Atlanta. "We decided to go with FormalPro due to some past relationships with Mentor, and we also felt it was a better tool. We have been using FormalPro now for about two months, and so far we are very pleased. Mentor is very interested in making us successful, so the support has been great."

I went to DeepChip.com and did a search on FormalPro.

In ESNUG 373, Raimund Soenning of Philips Semiconductor had written about how memory-efficient FormalPro was. But in the SNUG'02 survey, a bunch of engineers beat up FormalPro.

One engineer defended FormalPro. "I think Verplex is more mature, but is not enough user-friendly," said Gideon Paul of TeraChip. "Mentor FormalPro is much more user-friendly, easy to use and gives faster results."

Evidently those attacks prompted engineers from Jennic, Ciena and Lucent to write positive technical reviews of FormalPro as a follow-up in ESNUG 394. And now these new discussions of FormalPro pop up in ESNUGs 400, 402 and 403. Hmm.

It appears that users now see Mentor's FormalPro as a viable third option in the equivalency-checking market.

John Cooley runs the e-mail synopsys users group (ESNUG), is a contract asic designer and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@theworld.com or (508) 429-4357.

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