Well, in release 2.0 of their ABV that was announced late last month, 0-In unveiled two new tools:

0-In claim that this new suite allows designers to systematically and efficiently detect a variety of key bug types that are difficult to identify using traditional verification techniques:

The two points that really grabbed my attention here are the Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) bugs and the low-probability data-dependent bugs. In the case of CDC considerations, the number of clock domains employed by some designs has ramped up dramatically over the last year or so (I recently heard of a design with 300 clock domains — this may be old news to you, but it certainly made my eyes water, let me tell you).

The answer here is the new 0-In Checklist tool, which analyses the RTL, detects potential problem areas, and automatically generates CDC-based checks that will run in simulation and in formal verification.

One of the things I really hate about a lot of tools is that they overwhelm you with information. I remember using Static Timing Analysis (STA) tools that would bury you under reams of computer printout listing tens of thousands of false-positive errors. The end result was that you often missed real errors that were hiding in the morass of meaningless messages.

Well 0-In seem to have cracked this problem, because at every level their tests result in a Pass, Fail, or Ambiguous condition. In the case of the Ambiguous results (which equate to false positives), these are automatically promoted to the next level of verification without you having to worry about them. The ability to limit reports to only real errors is a real "Cool Beans" aspect of the system as far as I'm concerned.

In the case of low-probability, data-dependent bugs, you might potentially have one problem pattern on a 64-bit wide bus, which means that you have to hunt this "needle" down in a "haystack" consisting of 2 to the power of 64 "straws"! Some of these data-dependent bugs require you to try a lot of initial states (this class is addressed by 0-In Search), while others require you to go down-and-deep (this class is addressed by the new 0-In Confirm). The beauty once again is that any ambiguous results from 0-In Search are automatically promoted to 0-In Confirm for further analysis.

I love this automatic promotion concept. In a conversation with some of the guys and gals from 0-In, they told me that their philosophy is to identify and detect bugs with the least amount of human and computer effort — and that certainly works for me. So it's another "Cool Beans" for 0-In from me. Until next time, have a good one!