Ascent Now Automatically Ensures X-Robust Designs
Real Intent 's Ascent functional verification product now includes an automated solution to ensure X-robust designs, available through the Ascent Path-Based Verification (PBV) product. Explicit and implicit X sources (X assignments in RTL and non-resettable flops, respectively) in the designs can lead to many challenging issues for design verification, such as masking real design errors and causing RTL-to-netlist simulation mismatches. Depending on coding styles, simulation results can be X-pessimistic, which lead to unnecessary unknown values; or X-optimistic, which result in known values when they should have been unknown. Design and verification teams write properties to trap Xs or instrument two-value simulation with random initialisation to avoid X ambiguity in order to detect design errors. However, these approaches take a considerable amount of manual and computational resources without offering the complete confidence of X robustness. Ascent PBV offers a multi-faceted solut...