While hard data on the economic recovery won't be available until the second-quarter results are in, we're seeing more activity in electronic design automation. That's not to say that the electronics industry isn't still struggling to navigate in uncertain waters.

My cautious optimism holds especially true in EDA's formal-verification sector, which shouldn't be too much of a surprise. After all, verification still takes up more than 70 percent of the design cycle. Many consider it the bottleneck of the entire design flow.

With the start of each new IC development project, designers are asked to compress the production cycle and reduce the budget and head count, even as they're expected to add functionality and complexity to the chip. Of course, with this growing complexity, it gets harder to verify that the chip will work as intended. Electronics companies worldwide need solutions to this problem and are willing to pay for them.

Enter formal verification. A viable, proven alternative to traditional and outmoded means of finding errors in chips, formal verification exhaustively applies rigorous mathematical algorithms to prove that a design is behaving correctly.

In uncertain economic times, it's easy to get sidetracked or distracted. At Verplex Systems we have continued to focus on our charter and vision, and on the technology that realizes that vision. We believe that verification is a huge challenge for design teams and that we have an opportunity to develop products to meet that challenge.

We have expanded our reach by adding to and strengthening our core product line and by filling it in with other formal-verification software offerings to support emerging implementation techniques. We have concentrated on making our products solid and ensuring they meet designers' needs. We've focused on our customers, making their needs and successes our needs and successes. This strategy has started to pay off; it has enabled us to displace older-generation verification products in some design environments.

Employee morale is a key consideration for electronics companies large and small, especially in today's economic climate. It's increasingly important for companies to invest in their employees, keeping them motivated and dedicated to growing the business, and encouraging them to make a difference. The talented team at Verplex has offered up its experience, skills and focus to help design teams address complex verification challenges and loosen the verification bottleneck.