Using transformations and verification in circuit design

Saxe, James B.; Horning, James J.; Guttag, John V.; Garland, Stephen J.

doi:10.1007/bf01384073

Cited by 20 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Other work on pipelined microprocessors includes Srivas and Bickford [1990]; Tahar and Kumar [1993]; Saxe et al [1993]; Windley [1995b]; and Levitt and Olukotun [1996]. 4.1.3 FM9001.…”

Section: Microprocessorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal verification in hardware design

Kern

Greenstreet

1999

ACM Trans. Des. Autom. Electron. Syst.

211

117

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In recent years, formal methods have emerged as an alternative approach to ensuring the quality and correctness of hardware designs, overcoming some of the limitations of traditional validation techniques such as simulation and testing.There are two main aspects to the application of formal methods in a design process: the formal framework used to specify desired properties of a design and the verification techniques and tools used to reason about the relationship between a specification and a corresponding implementation. We survey a variety of frameworks and techniques proposed in the literature and applied to actual designs. The specification frameworks we describe include temporal logics, predicate logic, abstraction and refinement, as well as containment between -regular languages. The verification techniques presented include model checking, automatatheoretic techniques, automated theorem proving, and approaches that integrate the above methods.In order to provide insight into the scope and limitations of currently available techniques, we present a selection of case studies where formal methods were applied to industrial-scale designs, such as microprocessors, floating-point hardware, protocols, memory subsystems, and communications hardware.

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“…Other work on pipelined microprocessors includes Srivas and Bickford [1990]; Tahar and Kumar [1993]; Saxe et al [1993]; Windley [1995b]; and Levitt and Olukotun [1996]. 4.1.3 FM9001.…”

Section: Microprocessorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal verification in hardware design

Kern

Greenstreet

1999

ACM Trans. Des. Autom. Electron. Syst.

211

117

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“…In terms of verification, our approach is most similar to two known techniques, called retiming [14,23,26] and unpipelining [15]. A circuit is retimed when the delay components of the circuit are repositioned, while the functional components are left unchanged, effectively through repeated applications of the timeinvariance law.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Elementary Microarchitecture Algebra

Matthews

Launchbury

1999

Computer Aided Verification

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“…Recently, mechanical verification has been applied to a number of pipelined processors [4,25,27,29,30]. But, there has not been much work in developing a general framework for microprocessor correctness.…”

Section: Pipelined Microprocessor Correctnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying formal verification to the AAMP5 microprocessor: A case study in the industrial use of formal methods

Srivas

Miller

1996

Form Method Syst Des

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Formal specification combined with mechanical verification is a promising approach for achieving the extremely high levels of assurance required of safety-critical digital systems. However, many questions remain regarding their use in practice: C an these techniques scale up to industrial systems, where are they likely to be useful, and how should industry go about incorporating them into practice? This paper discusses a project undertaken to answer some of these questions, the formal verification of the microcode in the AAMP5 microprocessor. This project consisted of formally specifying in the PVS language a Rockwell proprietary microprocessor at both the instruction-set and register-transfer levels and using the PVS theorem prover to show the microcode correctly implemented the instruction-level specification for a representative subset of instructions. Notable aspects of this project include the use of a formal specification language by practicing hardware and software engineers, the integration of traditional inspections with formal specifications, and the use of a mechanical theorem prover to verify a portion of a commercial, pipelined microprocessor that was not explicitly designed for formal verification.

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Using transformations and verification in circuit design

Cited by 20 publications

References 5 publications

Formal verification in hardware design

Formal verification in hardware design

Elementary Microarchitecture Algebra

Applying formal verification to the AAMP5 microprocessor: A case study in the industrial use of formal methods

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