If you're a chip designer or verification engineer, you have likely spent countless hours stressing over whether your design block is functionally accurate; in other words, "Will my chip actually do what it's supposed to?" Today, Cadence is announcing the next evolutions of its Conformal family of products to help you answer that exact question better. Introducing: Conformal AI Studio. I want to take a few words to tell you what inspired the technology, how it works, and why you should care.
The Critical Role of LEC
Logical equivalence checking (LEC) is pivotal in the design implementation process. Traditionally, it allows designers to verify that the functionality remains consistent through various design stages without the need for extensive retesting. By testing the design once at the register transfer level (RTL) and then formally proving that subsequent stages—ranging from gate-level designs to final transistor implementations—are logically equivalent, it not only saves time but also reduces costs significantly. This methodology has long been the backbone of cost-effective verification strategies. However, the last 10 to 15 years have witnessed a paradigm shift in the complexity of designs and the corresponding challenges with LEC.
With SoCs containing 100 times more logic than in previous years and a substantial increase in the number of power domains and functional engineering change orders (ECOs), traditional methods of proving logical equivalence have become increasingly inadequate. The growth of advanced synthesis optimizations, which have proliferated from merely a handful of critical blocks to become a ubiquitous element of the design process, adds to this complexity. Despite these challenges, the fundamental technology underpinning LEC had only seen incremental improvements. As a result, a new approach toward verification is paramount, one that reconsiders the way equivalence is established.
Rethinking Equivalence: A Shift in Approach
To genuinely address the complexities in today's semiconductor designs, the industry must transition from the outdated methodology of proving designs as equivalent in isolation. Real-world designs are not static; they have a life cycle characterized by continuous growth and change. Each stage of a project generates a wealth of historical data that often goes untapped. I would claim that, through most of its history, EDA implementation by default has amnesia. This same inefficiency applies to solutions related to logical equivalence. Our industry must better leverage historical insights to inform and enhance current software solutions.
Embracing AI and ML
One of the most promising avenues for augmenting semiconductor design productivity lies in applying AI and ML techniques. EDA companies, with Cadence at the forefront, are actively deploying these advanced methodologies to streamline chip design and verification processes. AI-driven solutions can vastly improve efficiency by introducing predictive capabilities that draw on historical data. Moreover, AI can assist in optimizing synthesis results by recognizing which optimizations are likely to impact equivalence.
So, given the longstanding value of equivalence checking, the need for a shift in approach, and the broader EDA trends in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), what exactly is Cadence announcing today with Conformal AI Studio?
Conformal AI Studio: Core Benefits
Conformal AI is a comprehensive suite that reimagines the current Conformal products and delivers three key new benefits:
- We're delivering critical productivity improvements that will make users an order of magnitude more efficient. This is possible due to simplified setup and core engine speedups, including a new distributed low-power engine that allows us to scale full chip power signoff to billions of instances. Our new AI-based diagnostic dashboards will streamline usage and enable cross-project insights, while ML-driven abort resolution will help solve one of the most complex problems our advanced users face today.
- We are introducing a new SmartECO flow that delivers up to 10X better runtime and patch size. We're leveraging earlier RTL-level information and new Boolean optimization algorithms to handle designs with many hierarchies and advanced datapath, while our AI-driven recipe selection makes implementing functional ECOs simple and efficient.
- While the Conformal family is committed to always being implementation tool agnostic, we're doubling down on ensuring our flows work best with our Cadence tools. New support for sequential optimizations in the Cadence Genus, Joules, and Innovus solutions, as well as expanded reinforcement learning techniques, can help both lower power and improve performance.
Conformal AI Studio: AI/ML Innovations
In addition to these critical new core engines and flow improvements, this generation of Conformal technology leverages AI/ML in a number of new ways. Deep integrations to Cadence's JedAI big data platform allow design teams to mine data across a project's history and learn from customers' unique design styles and tool strategies. Conformal AI Studio can now intelligently spawn off multiple parallel scenarios using the Cadence Cerebrus reinforcement learning system to rapidly explore the full solution spaces for the most challenging problems, like proving equivalence when facing complex aborts or ensuring ECO patches are both functionally optimal and implementable through place-and-route, STA, and physical signoff.
Conformal AI Studio: Always Implementation Agnostic
For decades, the Conformal family has been the industry leader in the LEC subset of formal verification and is the key auditor for ensuring that digital implementation tools from both Cadence and other EDA vendors do what they're supposed to. We have never wavered from that mission of being your trusted golden signoff regardless of your implementation flow, and the Cadence Conformal AI Studio represents the exciting next chapter.
Conformal AI Studio: New Product Offerings
Taken together, these Conformal AI Studio innovations will help your implementation teams achieve their design goals and are available from three core products:
- Conformal AI Equivalence– Enables distributed Boolean LEC, AI dashboards, and ML-driven proof engines
- Conformal AI ECO– Automates pre- and post-mask functional ECO generation, creating high-quality, efficient, and implementable patches that ensure schedule predictability
- Conformal AI Low Power– Verifies that low-power circuit structures in complex SoCs match the design's power intent using distributed and hierarchical flows and performs efficient two-design low-power compare
Conclusion
As the semiconductor industry grapples with soaring design complexities, harnessing innovative technologies becomes increasingly urgent. LEC remains a cornerstone of verification practices, but its evolution is necessary to meet contemporary challenges. By embracing the capabilities of AI and ML, we can help you turn data into actionable insights, optimize workflows, and foster collaboration across teams. This is not just about keeping pace; it's about leading the charge toward a future where engineers can design smarter, faster, and more efficiently than ever before. The transformation is underway, and Cadence can help chip designs confidently answer that overarching question of "Will my chip do what it's supposed to?" with "Yes, it will, when you sign off with Conformal AI Studio!"
Learn more about Conformal AI Studio.