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What AI tools actually change about verification — and what they don’t

  DESIGN VERIFICATION  ·  ARTICLE 06 OF 06 What AI tools actually change about verification — and what they don’t AI can write a UVM agent. It cannot tell you if your coverage model is correct. That distinction is the whole game right now.   Every few months, a new wave of content arrives claiming that AI is about to transform chip design. Sometimes the claim is that AI will write RTL. Sometimes it’s that AI will generate testbenches. Sometimes it’s that AI will close coverage automatically, or debug failing regressions, or replace the verification engineer entirely. None of this is happening at the level the headlines suggest. Some of it is happening at a narrower, more useful level that the headlines miss entirely. The gap between what AI tools actually do in a verification context and what gets written about them is wide enough to cause real confusion — both among engineers trying to decide whether to invest time in these tools, and among managers trying to assess...
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Formal verification isn’t scary — you’re just using it wrong

  DESIGN VERIFICATION   ·   ARTICLE 05 OF 06 Formal verification isn’t scary — you’re just using it wrong Most teams treat formal like a fire extinguisher — only when there’s a fire, and usually too late. Here’s how to bake it into your flow from day one.   Formal verification has a reputation problem. Among DV engineers who haven’t used it, formal is the thing that requires a PhD, takes weeks to set up, and either proves your design is correct (unlikely) or times out after 24 hours (common). Among engineers who have used it badly — usually by throwing a formal tool at a large, unconstrained design and waiting for magic — the reputation is similar: powerful in theory, impractical in practice. Both characterizations are wrong in the same way. They describe formal applied incorrectly, to the wrong problems, without the setup work that makes it useful. Formal verification, used well, is one of the few techniques in the DV toolkit that can give you a math...
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