Ankit

Ankit Kumar Garg

Senior Manager, Formal Verification ,
Nvidia

About the Speaker

Ankit Garg is Senior Formal Verification Manager at NVIDIA in Santa Clara, with over 18 years of semiconductor experience. He has held roles in RTL design, ASIC verification at Qualcomm, and formal applications engineering at Synopsys, and now leads a formal verification team working on CPU, GPU, and high‑performance computing designs at NVIDIA.

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Forward Progress: Formal Verification beyond Function testing

Overview

This presentation talks about how formal verification can systematically find deadlock, livelock, and starvation bugs that escape simulation‑based corner, random, and stress tests. Using real case studies, we also compare safety vs liveness assertions for forward‑progress properties, explain when to use each, and share convergence techniques and RTL design guidelines. Formal liveness checks uncover substantially more forward‑progress issues than safety‑only approaches, highlighting why forward progress must be treated as a first‑class verification goal, not a side effect of functional testing.

Key Points

  • Formal Verification
  • Forward progress testing
  • SVA