Sean Safarpour, PhD

About the Speaker

Sean Safarpour is a Fellow at AMD, leading efforts in formal verification deployment, scaling, and innovation. Prior to AMD, he led the formal verification R&D team at Synopsys as Executive Director for four years, after six years as Director of Product and Application Engineering. He previously held director roles at Atrenta and was co-founder and VP at Vennsa. Sean received his PhD and Master’s degrees from the University of Toronto and his Bachelor’s from the University of British Columbia. He has 35+ papers, 5 patents, and 2 books to his name.

Game Changer: AI Makes Verification Formal

Overview

On November 30th 2022, ChatGPT was publicly released. In 4 short years, we have seen our technical working world get transformed. AI-generated code now accounts for 70-90%1 of all new code at some companies. Token usage has increased 330X2 in the last two years alone, as people realize the benefits and impact of using AI in their daily tasks. This trend includes all aspects of hardware design and verification. In this talk I make the case that AI is the dream technology Formal Verification has been missing for decades. AI allows every formal barrier to be reduced to such an extent to drive tremendous deployment of formal verification. In a world where first-time silicon continues to be a challenge and verification cost/effort increases relentlessly3, Formal Verification will become the main verification approach in 5 years.

Key Points

• Formal Verification will become the dominant verification approach in 5 years