FormalPro Testimonials

1/26/06  Russell Petersen - ASIC Engineer Scientific Atlanta Inc.

We too use Formalpro and love it because even after 3 evaluations now over a few years against Conformal Ultra and Formality it continues to destroy the competition. In other words, I continue to see it capable of solving things that Conformal and Formality choke on and do it much faster. Hence, I'm very interested in the tool continuing. I too have heard these rumors and so far I don't believe them. I have talked with Mentor extensively about this and they continue to assure us they have no plans to cut the product. Everything supportwise and development wise seems to bear this out. Just last year they added a good number of customers (can't remember the figure they gave me but it was significant). Also,feature requests are being honored and put into the tool (not small nitpicky requests either but new significant functionality kinds of things). Hence, even though they might not be as actively marketing the tool they are still selling and developing it.

In short, I understand the worries as we have had them ourselves in the past but this is far too good of a tool for Mentor to abandon and so far I don't see too much to convince me they are. I also recommend anyone out there using the Conformal or Formality tools to take a good look at Formalpro. I do like the Cadence Conformal folks just fine as I'm friends with some of them but I still hold that Conformal can't quite hold a candle to Formalpro in performance and solvability. We do very large 6 million instance plus SOCs here so I have thrown about the biggest test cases at these tools that they could reasonably handle (note: not the whole SOC in rtl of course as that's way too big for any tool :) ) so I feel I have a fair basis to continue to say that

1/25/06

Thanks go to customer Brian Janes of Rockwell Collins, Inc. for his support: http://www.deepchip.com/items/0450-05.html