Making formal normal

We are always a foot away from an electronic chip. Whether it is a mobile phone, a laptop, a smartwatch, a car, or a plane – semiconductors are driving the world. Our reliance on electronic chips powered by semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) designs, and the underlying software has never been more profound.

From aerospace, healthcare, and automotive to intelligent AI/ML-powered consumer appliances and industrial process control systems powering up our electrical grids – IC designs are everywhere, and we cannot afford to have failures or defects in these. Whether it is the failure of Ariane 5 or Intel’s FDIV, or the meltdown and spectre security flaws, functional verification of ASICs and FPGAs based on dynamic simulation is struggling.

If you factor in requirements of functional safety and security, conventional simulation-based verification struggles to provide assurance. The only way to guarantee the absence of bugs is via a mathematical proof of correctness, possible only via formal methods.

At Axiomise, our vision is to make formal normal, and for the last six years, we have been doing just that!

We have pioneered the adoption of formal verification in the semiconductor industry since 2017.  Led by our visionary CEO, Dr. Ashish Darbari, who has 63 patents in formal verification, and Neil Dunlop an industry veteran with 40 years of experience, Axiomise has helped twenty customers over the last six years by providing them access to bleeding-edge formal verification methodology via its training programmes, consulting & services and vendor-neutral formal verification app for end-to-end verification of RISC-V processors.

We have made it easier for our customers to deploy formal methods on complex SoCs through our abstraction-driven methodologies and six-dimensional coverage solutions that can be used with any commercial formal verification tool. Axiomise experts can tackle the most challenging formal verification problems on RISC-V, Arm, or x86 processors, GPUs or video blocks, networking blocks including WiFi and 5G, AI/ML hardware, and NoC-based fabrics.

We have helped customers with the usual functional verification challenges but also on safety-critical and security verification tasks finding bugs in previously verified designs and establishing exhaustive proof of bug absence.

Axiomise was founded in 2017  by Dr. Ashish Darbari, who has spent over two decades in the industry and top research labs increasing formal verification adoption. At Axiomise, we believe the only way to make formal methods mainstream for all semiconductor design verification is to enable and empower the end-user of formal – the hundreds of designers and verification engineers in the semiconductor industry. Dr. Darbari was joined by Neil Dunlop in 2022. Between Neil and Ashish, the Axiomise leadership team has over 60 years of formal verification experience on projects – not available anywhere in the world.

We enable formal verification adoption by simplifying the jargon and showing you on your projects how complex problems are easily solved through Axiomise’s abstraction-driven methodologies.  Talk to us and find out how our solutions are helping some of the top semiconductor design houses and how we can make formal normal for you and your team. We have helped scores of customers in the last six years on projects and trained over 300 engineers across the industry, besides deploying our automated formal verification app called formalISA to find bugs and build proofs of bug absence.

Learn how to apply formal in a predictable way to achieve high-quality sign-off – we guarantee once you work with us, you will fall in love with formal!

Abstraction-driven, scalable methodologies

Vendor-neutral – our solutions work with any commercial tool

Automated architectural formal verification for RISC-V

SoC formal verification powered by our services

On-demand and instructor-led training programmes

Enabling end-to-end formal sign-off for processors, GPUs, video blocks, networking, AI/ML and more

As founder & CEO of Axiomise, Dr. Ashish Darbari has led the company to successfully deploy the unique combination of training, consulting, services, and verification IP to various customers. Ashish has expertise in all aspects of formal methods, including theorem proving, property checking, and equivalence checking. Although he has a Doctorate in formal verification from the University of Oxford, to learn formal verification from him, you don’t need a PhD!  Some of his former students work at Apple®, Arm®, Blu Wireless®, CERN®, DW Holdings®, Diffblue®, Displaylink®, Meta®,  Imagination Technologies®, Infineon®, Intel®, Nokia®, Raytheon®, Rockwell Automation®, Rockley Photonics®, Synopsys®, OneSpin Solutions®, and Xilinx®, to name a few.

Ashish has been actively using formal methods for over two decades.  He is one of the foremost authorities in practical applied formal verification, having trained  300 designers and verification engineers worldwide. A keen innovator in formal verification, Ashish has 60+ patents in formal verification. He is also the author of the formalISA® app.

For more information on what people say about us, check out testimonials. Some testimonials that couldn’t make it to the website can be found on [1, 2].

Neil Dunlop is the chief technology officer (CTO) at Axiomise. Neil is an industry veteran with several decades of experience in the semiconductor industry and exclusively in the field of formal verification for more than 40 years since obtaining an MSc in Computation from the University of Oxford. Neil started his career with assembler programming and micro-code programming before dabbling in the HOL theorem prover. As a formal verification expert with extensive experience using a variety of formal tools, he has worked on hardware design & formal verification at Inmos, STMicroelectronics, ST Ericsson and Imagination Technologies.

Laura is the Director of Business Development at Axiomise. She has over 15 years of experience in business development and marketing. She has built strong expertise working with clients and prospective clients with presence and/or residence in various countries of the European Union, in the UK and in the Americas. She has a deep understanding of the cultural differences between these countries besides being fluent in four European languages. Laura started her career as a Marketing Assistant in Uruguay over 20 years ago, moved to London and has lived in the United Kingdom, France, and Italy since then. She holds a graduate degree in International Relations and a degree in Marketing.