Case Study: Newport Media achieves earlier bug detection and weeks of verification time‑savings with Cadence Design Systems' Incisive Formal Verifier and Assertion‑Based VIP

Newport Media - Customer Case Study

Newport Media is a Southern California fabless semiconductor company that develops highly integrated receiver ICs for mobile TV and digital audio, including its multi-standard Sundance Series. For a new design revision with an external bus interface — a 40K-gate block containing an AHB master/slave, microprocessor interface, and DMA engine — the verification team needed to speed up verification, expose hard-to-find protocol bugs, and write more extensive tests to probe corner cases.

Newport Media adopted Cadence Incisive Formal Verifier and Incisive Assertion-Based VIP (AHB VIP), which provided plug-and-play protocol checks and clear, readable assertions. The team brought up the verification environment in about 15 minutes, used formal analysis to pinpoint bugs in roughly an hour, and eliminated weeks of work; as a result they started verification earlier, reduced re-spins and risk, and improved verification quality, predictability, and schedule velocity.

Newport Media

Sang Tran

Manager VLSI Technology