Real Intent’s Formal Assertion-Based Verification Software Verifies ATI’s Radeon Graphics Chips : Verix™ eliminates design bugs early in the development cycle for faster verification

Real Intent’s Formal Assertion-Based Verification Software Verifies ATI’s Radeon Graphics Chips

Verix™ eliminates design bugs early in the development cycle for faster verification

Santa Clara, Calif: May 7, 2004 – Today Real Intent, the leading supplier of formal assertion-based verification (ABV) software for block-to-chip-level electronic system design, announced that ATI Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATI) has deployed Real Intent’s Verix™ software to verify several Radeon chips, the latest in its highly successful family of graphics products.

ATI selected Verix as its formal ABV solution after an extensive evaluation against several competing offerings. “We looked at virtually every product in the market before selecting Verix," said Bob Patel, Director of Engineering at ATI. “Our team was impressed by its ability to catch corner-case bugs with relative ease. We have deployed Verix in our verification flow to detect and completely eliminate numerous classes of design errors early in the development cycle. The tool has helped us shorten our project schedules and reduce the resources needed to achieve chip tapeout.”

"Verix has been invaluable to us as the first verification tool that we run on our RTL designs," said Eric Demers, Engineering Manager at ATI. "It easily catches a host of design bugs that have traditionally been hard to find in simulation or have taken significant verification cycles to detect. Verix has allowed us to shorten our simulation time by eliminating most common bugs one encounters with new RTL. We are pleased that Real Intent has built a great formal ABV product, and we have come to reply upon it for our graphics projects."

ATI Technologies designs and implements industry-leading high-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) chips. Verix has been used by GPU designers to verify several of their leading-edge designs, including Radeon.

"We are very pleased to see ATI designers and verification engineers benefit from a formal tool like Verix," said Real Intent President and CEO Prakash Narain. "The ATI experience clearly demonstrates that Verix formal ABV is providing value to leading-edge designs today and is tackling real-life verification challenges.”

About Real Intent’s Verix
Verix is Real Intent's pioneering assertion-driven formal verification system for exhaustively verifying that a design is free from complex, corner-case errors that are hard to catch in simulations. Verix is easy to use because of its automatic setup and built-in assertions. Formal engines, combined with patented hierarchical formal verification, give Verix the highest capacity in the industry.

Verix supports Accellera’s Open Verification Library (OVL) and Property Specification Language (PSL) as well as the IEEE standards for Verilog and VHDL (IEEE 1364 and IEEE 1076, respectively). Later this year, Real Intent plans to announce support for Accellera’s SystemVerilog.

About Real Intent
Real Intent, Inc. offers assertion-based formal verification products for electronic design. Its products are used at over 25 leading semiconductor design companies in North America, Japan and Europe. Its products offer users the capability of comprehensively verifying designs early in the design process and significantly reduce the cost of verifying integrated circuits, electronic systems and system on chip (SoC) devices.