Formal verification, especially error detection, is rapidly increasing in importance with the rising complexity of designs. The main constraint in verification is the total amount of resources available - both time as well as memory. Most attempts at verification only use a single processor. Recently, various attempts have been made to use parallel and distributed methods for verification.
However, verification in a Grid-based environment has not yet been very widely adopted. As personal computers gain in computing capacity, the concept of computation grids is gaining acceptance. Here, a grid is a network of machines that may not be dedicated to a specific computational use, but may only be available some of the time. This is a unique environment where massive parallelism is possible by using otherwise idle CPU cycles from a large number of computers. Such processors may even be in geographically diverse locations. We describe a Grid-based verifi- cation environment for detecting errors in a design. We verify user-written assertions as well as properties, e.g. unreachable code, index-out-of-range, that are extracted automatically from the design using a state-of-the-art HDL parser. Such an approach can help the user to quickly find RTL level bugs earlier in the design cycle.