Formal verification as a technology transfer problem

Around 1990, various groups began to sense that the methods were sufficiently mature to warrant turning them into commercial tools. With ever-increasing design complexity, the cost of design testing was consuming an ever-greater portion of the design budget - as much as 80% - so more powerful methods for testing became badly needed. However, it soon became evident that what was useful in the hands of experts could not be directly converted into a useful commercial tool. The required methodology change included advancing verification to earlier stages of the development flow. This offered a big potential advantage for reducing development costs, since finding bugs earlier could save more costly fixes later. However, it required that developers participate in the verification process.