Jasper Connectivity Verification App

Key Benefits

Captures complex specifications in familiar, human, and machine-readable formats
Automatically generates connectivity specification from known-good design for use on derivative designs (reverse connectivity)
Generates all properties automatically
Automatically black-boxes unnecessary IP blocks for connectivity verification
Performs exhaustive verification in hours vs. days or weeks
Fast debug via Visualize and QuietTrace technology

By capturing complex specifications in a familiar format, the Cadence^® Jasper^™ Connectivity Verification (CONN) App allows you to exhaustively verify the static, structural, temporal, and conditional connectivity of IP blocks inside a system on chip (SoC). Specifically, the app first takes the connectivity specification—captured in a comma-separated-values (CSV) file or an IP-XACT XML file—and the register-transfer level (RTL) design as inputs. Then the Jasper CONN App automatically generates structural, behavioral, and temporal connectivity checks, exhaustively verifying if the connectivity is as specified. A utility is included so you can quickly black-box out unnecessary IP blocks to keep the analysis focused on connectivity, allowing the connectivity verification to scale readily to full chip level.

While “correct-by-construction” tools and techniques go a long way, errors can still creep in due to unclear or erroneous specifications, the addition of low-power structures, built-in self-test (BIST), and JTAG support, or downstream changes/engineering change orders (ECOs) that weren’t fully propagated. In addition, connectivity of a sub-module that appears correct may prove to be erroneous in a larger scope.

The Jasper CONN App performs exhaustive verification in hours, not the days or weeks common for simulation-based approaches. Unlike competitive formal connectivity apps that output noisy, hard to read counterexamples (CEX), the app’s Jasper Visualize™ Interactive Debug Environment with QuietTrace™ debugging capabilityshows errors via “low-noise”, minimum-length CEX traces for high user productivity. Since creating the connectivity definition can be tedious and error-prone, the app can also extract connectivity from a golden RTL and verify any unintended changes in a subsequent RTL revision. The Jasper CONN App is completely automated, so you won’t need to learn formal or SystemVerilog Assertions (SVAs).

Key Features

Supports all connectivity types: unconditional/static, constant and dynamic conditional, combinational value propagation without latencies, sequential value propagation with latencies and pipelined connections with multiple clocks and resets
Captures the connectivity description in open, human, and machine-readable CSV or IP-XACT XML files
Includes a utility to quickly black-box the internals of the design to focus the verification only on connectivity
Easy to fully automate this flow and run it in a regression mode
Reverse connectivity capability enables you to automatically create a high-level connectivity specification from your known-good design
Supports parallelism with our Jasper ProofGrid™ Intelligent Resource Manager’s formal engine control utility

Jasper RTL Apps