Verysys To Introduce New Tornado Equivalence Checker

At the Design Automation Conference (DAC), Verysys Design Automation unveils the firm's next generation equivalence checker. Called Tornado, the new design tool is used for verification of multi-million gate IC designs, and it provides improvements over the company's earlier StructureProver tool series. The Tornado equivalence checker eliminates the need for gate level simulation after design iterations, which synthesize logic, optimize logic, or insert test structures. Tornado statically compares two versions of a chip design with mathematical precision to ensure they have the identical functionality, or if not, the tool identifies the differences.

Compared to Verysys' previous StructureProver tools, Tornado handles larger designs, provides up to four times faster compilation speeds, provides higher overall performance and provides functional matching to supplement name matching of key circuit points. Among Tornado's principal user benefits are significant design cycle time compression, verification task cost reduction and improvement in IC design quality.

Designed to complement logic verification tools and synthesis methodologies, Tornado plugs seamlessly into existing industry design flows -- protecting existing investments in tools, libraries and support. Tornado accepts standard netlists from Synopsys and synthesis tools to perform independent RTL-gate static verification.

Tornado's key features include: Support of a rich set of input formats including Verilog and VHDL and gate level netlists; support for existing ASIC simulation, comparison of all combinations of register transfer level and gate level designs, automatic intelligent key point matching between designs, and intuitive graphic user interface.

Tornado employs a new proprietary verification engine, and shares the remaining proven high-performance elements of the tool, specifically HDL translation, user interface and debug environment, with existing StructureProver products. This ensures the reliability and quality of those sections so that existing StructureProver users will face minimal migration problems.

Tornado is available as beta-site software, a full released product will be shipped in Q3 1999. It is priced (US domestic) at $70,000 per complete package that includes support for one hardware description language (Verilog or VHDL).

Verysys Design Automation, Inc. 42707 Lawrence Place, Fremont, California 94538 Phone: 510-445-3830 and 510-445-3838