News and New Products

When in doubt, change everything

By Gabe Moretti -- EDN, 7/10/2003

Most of the development news in the formal-verification market comes from small start-ups, pushing the technology to its limits to survive in times of lean venture-capital funding. The EDA industry is benefiting from what at times seems a determined, almost desperate, need to innovate or at least appear innovative. One of the small companies in this market, Tempus Fugit, has changed its name to Jasper Design Automation. The company has a new president and chief executive officer, Kathryn Kranen; a new chief methodologist, Harry Foster, who was previously chief architect at Verplex; and a new name for its product: JasperGold.

JasperGold employs State Space Tunneling to guide formal-proof engines to analyze only those portions of a design relevant to proving each requirement, thus enabling it to handle large designs. This approach allows the formal engine to achieve results that only semiformal-verification engines coupled with a logic simulator could previously achieve. JapserGold allows designers to capture specifications with either Verilog or a more appropriate system-design language. Jasper also offers prebuilt Proof Kits for many standard interfaces, such as PCI Express. JapserGold has a list price of $225,000.

Jasper Design Automation, 1-650-625-9830 www.jasper-da.com.