How does Solidify compare to simulation-based technologies?
With simulation based technologies, the designer sets up a set of testbenches, each consisting of a vector generation part and a set of self-checking tests. Additionally, the designer needs to use a coverage tool or set up coverage metrics inside the testbench to monitor the quality of the testbench as to how well it exercises the design. Testbenches take a long time to develop, are hard to maintain, take a long time to run, provide no correctness guarantees, are hard to analyze with respect to quality, and may miss difficult corner cases as they statistically cover a small portion of the state space of the design. The shortcomings will not improve much with faster simulation technologies. For example, assume the block under test has 200-inputs and 1000 flip-flops. Assume the current simulation technologies allow for simulating 230 vectors. Assume there is a simulation technology available which allows 260 vectors to be simulated over 50 cycles. The number of possible combinations of i
