JasperGold from Jasper Design Automation has been one of the leading formal verification tools practically since the formal verification market was created. About a year ago Oz Levia and Rob van Blommestein joined Jasper to help with marketing. The first new product under their leadership has just been launched. As you would expect it is a bit unconventional and yet quite modern.

JasperGold Apps is a collection of individual functions to help designers and verification engineers execute specific formal verification tasks within a shared interactive environment to fit the verification requirements of the specific design and development status they are working with. Engineers no longer have to use an entire formal verification tool, with all its overhead, when they just, for example, want to detect unexpected X conditions. With the new product they just run that App.

JasperGold Apps are built on a single platform that combines multiple formal-­based solutions and leverages a common shared database and user interface. The JasperGold Apps architecture enables sharing of design and verification data for each design under test (DUT) between Apps for increased consistency and productivity. The Apps architecture supports deployment of multiple Apps simultaneously as well as multiple invocations of the same App for improved throughput and performance.

With the JasperGold Apps designers have the advantage of a flexible, extensible, environment that supports the use of formal verification techniques in a quasi-interactive mode. The flexibility of the environment allows multiple engineers to use different Apps on the same design simultaneously, as well as using the same App on different portions of the design simultaneously. The resulting productivity gains are obvious.

Like with every App the initial offering is just that: a beginning. More will follow. The six initial Apps are:

• Formal Property Verification App
• Connectivity Verification App
• X-Propagations Verification App
• RTL Development App
• Control/Status Register Verification App
• Architectural Modeling App

From an analyst point of view this new product will benefit Jasper significantly. In addition to providing a new product, it will display the potential of the full JasperGold tool, provide a lower cost bridge to new customers, and position Jasper as a provider of productivity enhancing tools built with the modular engineer in mind.