Title
Hardware Verification Using Software Analyzers
Abstract
Program analysis is a highly active area of research, and the capacity and precision of software analyzers is improving rapidly. We investigate the use of modern software verification tools for formal property checking of hardware given in Verilog at register-transfer level. To this end, we translate RTL Verilog into an equivalent word-level ANSI-C program, according to synthesis semantics. The property of interest is instrumented into the Cprogram as an assertion. We subsequently apply three different software verification techniques -- bounded model checking, path-based symbolic simulation and abstract interpretation -- and compare their performance to conventional methods for property verification of hardware designs at net list and register transfer level. Our experimental results indicate that speedups of more than an order of magnitude are possible. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to perform property verification of hardware IPs given at register-transfer level using software verifiers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/ISVLSI.2015.107
2015 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI
Keywords
Field
DocType
Bounded Model Checking,Formal Verification,Netlist,RTL,Verilog,ANSI-C,Property Verification,Symbolic Simulation,SAT/SMT,Abstract Interpretation,Scalability
Functional verification,Programming language,Intelligent verification,Computer science,Verification,Formal methods,Computer hardware,High-level verification,Software verification and validation,Formal verification,Software verification
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2159-3469
4
0.47
References 
Authors
18
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rajdeep Mukherjee1113.40
Daniel Kroening23084187.60
Thomas F. Melham338435.63