This paper demonstrates a formal verificationplanning process and presents associated verification strategy that we believe is an essential (yet often neglected) step in an ASIC or SoC functional formal verification flow. Our contribution is to present a way to apply the verification planning process and a set of ion techniques on a non-trivial open-source example (the Sun OpenSPARCTM DDR2 controller). The process and verification strategy can be applied to DDR2 controllers in particular and generalized for other designs.