December 20, 2005 -- Real Intent, Inc. today announced that its Verix 5.0 software release with a new Convergence Engine is now shipping in volume. With this release, the entire Verix family of products - Implied Intent Verification, Clock Intent Verification, and Expressed Intent Verification - has received major improvements across the board, including performance and capacity increases, functionality and user interface improvements.

According to Real Intent, improvements of 10x in speed and capacity are possible for typical designs, and many designs which were impossible for other tools to formally verify, now complete quickly with Verix. SiCortex, a leading developer of high-performance cluster systems, is among the first to use Verix 5.0 in their design flows.

"The complexity of our project and the pressure of our aggressive schedule forced SiCortex to find additional ways to enhance our verification strategy. In parallel with writing functional tests and running as many simulations as possible, we decided to use static formal verification tools," said Oleg Petlin, Director of Verification at SiCortex.

"We evaluated the Verix family, including Implied Intent Verification and Expressed Intent Verification. We were impressed that we found real design bugs in a short time, without creating testbenches or assertions, using Implied Intent Verification. Moreover, with an early version of the Verix 5.0 software, we were able to gain deeper insight into our design using assertions and Expressed Intent. At 400 clock cycles, the depth of analysis was sufficient to prove the correctness of our assertions, and guarantee the circuit works properly. In addition, we learned an important lesson that investing time and money into assertion based verification pays dividends in both simulation and static formal verification environments. The Verix 5.0 Release and its Convergence Engine is a great step forward in power and utility. We bought Verix based on these results," concluded Petlin.

The core of performance and capacity increases are due to a proprietary new formal engine, the Convergence Engine. The Convergence Engine has two capabilities that deliver new levels of performance, Adaptive Orchestration, and 2-Dimensional Compression.

Adaptive Orchestration is a key new algorithm for deliberating a proof between multiple solvers to create a solution in the most optimal manner. By creating a dynamic nexus between multiple solvers, the overall proof is highly accelerated. 2-Dimensional Compression is a technology that combats state space explosion by focusing in on a subset of the design to process in two ways: The first dimension compresses using the natural hierarchy of the design, while the function and connectivity are taken into account for the second dimension. This effectively makes the design smaller, and runs faster.

In addition, design and clocking style support has been substantially increased across the solvers, leading to higher throughput in the system.

A completely revamped integration with Debussy, the debug interface from Novas, is now available as an option to 5.0, direct from Real Intent. The integration is much tighter, and specific areas of major improvement are the addition of clock domain coloration in RTL and schematic views, in our Clock Intent Verification tool. Clock domain crossing debugging has never been faster or more powerful.

Pricing and Availability

Verix 5.0 is shipping now. For price information, contact Real Intent.