SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Real Intent, Inc., today announced Conquest MAI, the industry’s first microarchitectural integrity sign-off tool. Conquest MAI automatically identifies standard functional components (SFCs) across the design hierarchy and performs localized integrity checks.
Its advanced debug capabilities, including FSM diagrams and SFC functional block schematics, support deep design understanding and exploration throughout the verification process. Conquest MAI’s quick setup and extremely fast performance make it practical to incorporate microarchitectural integrity sign-off as part of RTL sign-off.
Minimally Boolean: Enabling MAI sign-off during RTL sign-off
Simulation and formal verification methodologies rely heavily on Boolean analysis, and each carries significant limitations as a result. Formal verification is slow with capacity constraints that limit exhaustive analysis, while simulation is impractical due to the sheer volume of test benches and verification cycles required to achieve microarchitectural sign-off.
Conquest MAI is only minimally dependent on Boolean methods. It primarily uses abstract checking techniques and problem-specific analysis, avoiding full Boolean state-space solving. As a result, Conquest MAI:
- Runs 10x to 100x faster than formal, analyzing a million gates in minutes
- Exhaustively covers designs with billions of gates in hours, without black boxing
This combination enables engineers to incorporate microarchitectural integrity as part of RTL sign-off.
Inferring Functional Intent to Identify SFCs
Central to Conquest MAI is its ability to infer functional intent directly from RTL to automatically identify SFCs such as FSMs, FIFOs, counters, shifters, and memory. It analyzes logic behavior to understand what the design implements, rather than relying on syntactic patterns or naming conventions.
Conquest MAI’s intent inference is:
- Agnostic to coding style — identifies SFCs independent of RTL syntax or naming conventions
- Cross-hierarchy — recognizes components even when functionality is distributed across the design hierarchy
- Semantic rather than syntactic — identifies SFCs embedded within other SFCs and detects replicated SFCs created via arrays and generate constructs
This establishes the foundation for applying SFC-specific rules needed for microarchitectural integrity sign-off.
Microarchitectural Integrity Checks
Once Conquest MAI automatically identifies SFCs, designers can run microarchitectural integrity checks. Representative checks are:
- FSM state Hamming distance/weight — Confirm that FSM state encodings meet minimum Hamming distance and weight requirements for error detection of unintended bit flips.
- FIFO overflow & underflow — Check that FIFO control logic prevents writes when full and reads when empty, avoiding data loss or invalid data returns.
- Out-of-range counter usage – Report if a counter is being compared against values outside the counter range.
- Simultaneous RAM write ports – Check that RAMs with multiple write ports do not have overlapping write address ranges.
Visualizing Inferred SFCs for Debug
Conquest MAI applies its inferred-intent analysis to generate visualizations that present the structure and behavior of each SFC, independent of RTL coding style or implementation details. Examples include:
- SFC schematics
- Functional blocks with connectivity & control relationships
- Traditional schematic views of internal SFC structure
- FSM diagrams with states, transitions, resets, and conditions such as self-loops or unreachable paths.
- SFC viewer that shows relevant characteristics (e.g. clocks, resets…)
These graphical representations accelerate debug, support deep design understanding, and enable faster root-cause analysis of microarchitectural issues.
For more information, please visit Conquest MAI — Microarchitectural Integrity Sign-Off
About Real Intent
Real Intent provides intent-driven static sign-off EDA software tools to accelerate the shift left in advanced functional verification of digital designs. Its static sign-off product capabilities include RTL linting, clock domain crossing, reset domain crossing, microarchitectural integrity, DFT, hardware security, and connectivity & glitch. Real Intent customers include more than fifty major semiconductor and systems companies. Real Intent is headquartered at 932 Hamlin Court, Sunnyvale, CA. For more information visit http://www.realintent.com.
