Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Department of Amplification: Ben Chelf on Boolean Satisfiability (SAT)

analysis
Oct 18, 20071 min

Coverity's PR counsel just forwarded me a message from Ben Chelf, clarifying his note posted Wednesday: Thanks for posting Ben Chelf's comments so quickly.  Upon reading the posting, Ben realized that some of your readers may be confused by this statement: Boolean Satisfiability is the same type of technology that Synopsys, Cadence, and other EDA tools providers leverage in verifying chip designs. This new

Coverity’s PR counsel just forwarded me a message from Ben Chelf, clarifying his note posted Wednesday:

Thanks for posting Ben Chelf’s comments so quickly. 

Upon reading the posting, Ben realized that some of your readers may be confused by this statement:

Boolean Satisfiability is the same type of technology that Synopsys, Cadence, and other EDA tools providers leverage in verifying chip designs. This new technology, which is called SAT, allows the analysis, not only of all the paths through the code but also all of the potential values of the variables in any given path.

The technology actually isn’t new, it’s a new application of the technology Synopsys, Cadence, and other EDA tool providers have been using to find hardware defects. What is new is its application to software development.

Here’s a statement that might clear this up:

Synopsys, Cadence, and other EDA tools providers leverage Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) in verifying chip designs through sophisticated SAT-solvers that can solve formulas on millions of variables. The application of SAT-solvers to software analysis allows the analysis to cover not only all the paths through the code but also all the potential values of the variables in any given path.

Thanks again!

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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