( ESNUG 386 Item 6 ) --------------------------------------------- [01/16/02]
Subject: ( ESNUG 383 #15 ) Two Customer Evals Favor Formality Over Verplex
> We're interested in feedback on Design VERIFYer's competitive performance,
> but were surprised to see that the comparisons were done on a version
> that's more than a year old and 3 revs distant -- and with numbers that
> are way off that rev's usual performance. Maybe this customer would agree
> to a benchmark using the current rev?
>
> - Gerard Memmi
> Avanti/Chrysalis Fremont, CA
From: [ "Yay! No Layoffs Today!" ]
Please keep my name and company anonymous.
We have been using equivalency checking for almost 5 years. Our initial use
of EC was with Chrysalis, but made the transition to Formality about 3 years
ago. It is true, about two years ago, Formality R&D did take their eye of
the ball, and the tool had lost its competitive edge. The Formality R&D team
has responded to the Verplex "wake-up" call, and has made major improvements
to the tool, both in the usability of the tool, and in the complexity of the
designs it can compare. (It was the responsiveness of the local Synopsys
Formality consultant and R&D which kept us from considering a switch to
Verplex when Formality wasn't as competitive.)
Formality continues to be our primary equivalency checking tool, and we are
able to compare well over 95% of our designs. The 5% of our designs which
don't compare have been those which required a 64 bit version of the tool.
For those designs, we do use Verplex Tuxedo, which has been able to compare
most of those designs. We do also however encounter some designs which
won't compare in Verplex, but will compare in Formality.
Our experience overall has been that Formality does a better job comparing
netlist vs netlist, especially when there are hierarchical changes between
the two representations. Verplex, on the other hand, does a better job
comparing RTL vs gate. Since we do more gate vs gate compares, we are
sticking with Formality, while keeping our eye on Verplex.
- [ "Yay! No Layoffs Today!" ]
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: [ From The Land Of Pokemon ]
Please keep me anonymous on this one. I'm the engineer here responsible for
performing formal verification on the P&R netlists that we create. I have
access to both Formality and Verplex and decided to eval both tools before
we bought one.
I was successful in running both tools and they both gave me the correct
results. However, Formality was easier to use. It had better debugging
capabilities, and I liked the fact that it has a TCL interface. The
performance results also clearly favored Formality. In verifying a 700K
design, approximately 40% RAM (using Magma P&R), Formality was 25% faster
and 4X better in capacity over Verplex on the same design.
Our team did decided to buy Formality because of our eval results.
- [ From The Land Of Pokemon ]
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