Foundation for Success

Jin Zhang    Director, Technical Marketing

Real Intent has seen much success in the last few years despite the tough economic conditions facing the semiconductor and EDA (electronic design automation) industries during the recession. Real Intent’s revenue was up over 80% in 2010 and the size of the Real Intent team grew by 35% (and yes we are still looking for talented individuals to join our team!). This stellar growth was built upon a solid foundation. When talking to Russ Henke, contributing editor for EDACafe’s EDA Weekly, Prakash Narain, CEO of Real Intent, detailed the reasons for the success Real Intent had:

“It pays to learn hard lessons in life early. In the early years of Real Intent when we were focusing on harnessing the power of formal technology and automating it to make it easy to use for mass designers, we learned a lot about how to extract the real intent of the designs for complete and accurate analysis, how to optimize the formal analysis engines for high performance, how to simplify the user interface and reporting for maximum productivity, and how to architecture the tool flow to enable sign-off.

Over the years we have accumulated lots of knowhow and applied these techniques to different applications. For example, Meridian CDC has been used in production flows at dozens of companies and has helped tape out thousands of complex designs in the last 8 years. The ultimate goal for our customers is to be able to sign-off on CDC verification. Therefore we have adapted our philosophy and approach to CDC verification based on some basic principles:

1. We require more thorough environment setup because this provides the necessary confidence that CDC analysis will be accurate and complete so our users can sign-off on CDC verification in the end; The “setup-lite” approach taken by our competitors can leave holes in CDC verification and nasty surprises late in the cycle;
2. We identify the root cause of CDC issues and only report that rather than all the symptoms of it so that users don’t have to read through a huge report with lots of noise. It is impossible to sign-off when one can’t even go through and examine each line in the report;
3. Our structural and formal analysis are based on actual design principles to manage metastability rather than design templates, therefore Meridian CDC can handle more diverse designs styles;
4. We offer a layered approach to CDC verification at multiple levels, starting from ensuring correct environment setup, to precise structural analysis, to customized formal analysis, and to CDC verification using simulation. This layered approach ensures all holes are covered to achieve CDC sign-off.

Extending all the knowledge learned to simpler applications such as linting and constraints management is a much easier task. Other companies which started with simple technology like linting and now are trying to extend their solutions to formal are having a much deeper learning curve and are faced with a much harder task to conquer. We benefit from climbing the tallest mountain early. Now we can stand high, see farther and go farther. I think that’s our strength”.

Real Intent is poised for continued success in the years to come. We thank our customers and industry partners for the support along the way. We will keep focusing on providing the best products and excellent customer support to contribute to the growth of the semiconductor and EDA industries and our society at large.