Accellera hopes that Sugar will provide a standard way to write properties and check assertions in simulation and formal verification. Sugar is a declarative formal property language, but it also claims ease of use through a layered architecture that includes a Boolean layer, a temporal layer, a verification layer, and a modeling layer.

Sugar was developed in Israel at IBM's Haifa Research Laboratory, and has a long history of use inside IBM. Two researchers from that laboratory - Cindy Eisner and Dana Fisman - have prepared a Sugar 2.0 tutorial that gives EEdesign readers a basic overview of the language. Please click here for the PDF file that contains the tutorial.

Cindy Eisner has been a member of the Formal Methods Group at the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory since 1994. Previously, she worked on synthesis methodology at Zoran Microelectronics in Haifa, Israel, and on simulation tools for the language iHDL at Intel Corporation, also in Haifa, Israel. Her research interests include formal specification, architectural level modeling and verification, and formal verification of software.

Dana Fisman is a Ph.D. student at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, under the supervision of Professor Amir Pnueli. She received her M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2001 and her Bachelor degree from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel in 1998. She has been working in the Formal Methods Group at the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory since 1997. Her main research interests are specification and modeling of concurrent programs, temporal logic and automata, verification of parameterized systems and all aspects of formal verification.