Formal Verification

Formal Verification: An Essential Toolkit for Modern VLSI Design, Second Edition presents practical approaches for design and validation, with hands-on advice to help working engineers integrate these techniques into their work. Formal Verification (FV) enables a designer to directly analyze and mathematically explore the quality or other aspects of a Register Transfer Level (RTL) design without using simulations. This can reduce time spent validating designs and more quickly reach a final design for manufacturing. Building on a basic knowledge of SystemVerilog, this book demystifies FV and presents the practical applications that are bringing it into mainstream design and validation processes. Every chapter in the second edition has been updated to reflect evolving FV practices and advanced techniques. In addition, a new chapter, Formal Signoff on Real Projects, provides guidelines for implementing signoff quality FV, completely replacing some simulation tasks with significantly more productive FV methods. After reading this book, readers will be prepared to introduce FV in their organization to effectively deploy FV techniques that increase design and validation productivity. Covers formal verification algorithms that help users gain full coverage without exhaustive simulation Helps readers understand formal verification tools and how they differ from simulation tools Shows how to create instant testbenches to gain insights into how models work and to find initial bugs Presents insights from Intel insiders who share their hard-won knowledge and solutions to complex design problems

There are already many books on formal verification, from academic to application-centric, and from tutorials for beginners to guides for advanced users. Many are excellent for their intended purpose; we recommend a few at the end of this book. But most start from the assumption that you have already committed to becoming a hands-on expert (or in some cases that you already are an expert). We feel that detailed tutorials are not the easiest place to extract the introductory view many of us are looking for - background, a general idea of how methods work, applications and how formal verification is managed in the overall verification objective. Since we're writing for a fairly wide audience, we cover some topics that some of you may consider elementary (why verification is hard), some we hope will be of general interest (elementary understanding of the technology) and others that may not immediately interest some readers (setting up a formal verification team). What we intentionally do not cover at all is how to become a hands-on expert.

This book bridges fundamental gaps between control theory and formal methods. Although it focuses on discrete-time linear and piecewise affine systems, it also provides general frameworks for abstraction, analysis, and control of more general models. The book is self-contained, and while some mathematical knowledge is necessary, readers are not expected to have a background in formal methods or control theory. It rigorously defines concepts from formal methods, such as transition systems, temporal logics, model checking and synthesis. It then links these to the infinite state dynamical systems through abstractions that are intuitive and only require basic convex-analysis and control-theory terminology, which is provided in the appendix. Several examples and illustrations help readers understand and visualize the concepts introduced throughout the book.

This book provides an engineering insight into how to provide a scalable and robust verification solution with ever increasing design complexity and sizes. It describes SAT-based model checking approaches and gives engineering details on what makes model checking practical. The book brings together the various SAT-based scalable emerging technologies and techniques covered can be synergistically combined into a scalable solution.

An essential introduction to the analysis and verification of control system software The verification of control system software is critical to a host of technologies and industries, from aeronautics and medical technology to the cars we drive. The failure of controller software can cost people their lives. In this authoritative and accessible book, Pierre-Loïc Garoche provides control engineers and computer scientists with an indispensable introduction to the formal techniques for analyzing and verifying this important class of software. Too often, control engineers are unaware of the issues surrounding the verification of software, while computer scientists tend to be unfamiliar with the specificities of controller software. Garoche provides a unified approach that is geared to graduate students in both fields, covering formal verification methods as well as the design and verification of controllers. He presents a wealth of new verification techniques for performing exhaustive analysis of controller software. These include new means to compute nonlinear invariants, the use of convex optimization tools, and methods for dealing with numerical imprecisions such as floating point computations occurring in the analyzed software. As the autonomy of critical systems continues to increase—as evidenced by autonomous cars, drones, and satellites and landers—the numerical functions in these systems are growing ever more advanced. The techniques presented here are essential to support the formal analysis of the controller software being used in these new and emerging technologies.

Static analysis of software with deductive methods is a highly dynamic field of research on the verge of becoming a mainstream technology in software engineering. It consists of a large portfolio of - mostly fully automated - analyses: formal verification, test generation, security analysis, visualization, and debugging. All of them are realized in the state-of-art deductive verification framework KeY. This book is the definitive guide to KeY that lets you explore the full potential of deductive software verification in practice. It contains the complete theory behind KeY for active researchers who want to understand it in depth or use it in their own work. But the book also features fully self-contained chapters on the Java Modeling Language and on Using KeY that require nothing else than familiarity with Java. All other chapters are accessible for graduate students (M.Sc. level and beyond). The KeY framework is free and open software, downloadable from the book companion website which contains also all code examples mentioned in this book.

Formal verification is a powerful new digital design method. In this cutting-edge tutorial, two of the field's best known authors team up to show designers how to efficiently apply Formal Verification, along with hardware description languages like Verilog and VHDL, to more efficiently solve real-world design problems. Contents: Simulation-Based Verification * Introduction to Formal Techniques * Contrasting Simulation vs. Formal Techniques * Developing a Formal Test Plan * Writing High-Level Requirements * Proving High-Level Requirements * System Level Simulation * Design Example * Formal Test Plan * Final System Simulation

Advanced Formal Verification shows the latest developments in the verification domain from the perspectives of the user and the developer. World leading experts describe the underlying methods of today's verification tools and describe various scenarios from industrial practice. In the first part of the book the core techniques of today's formal verification tools, such as SAT and BDDs are addressed. In addition, multipliers, which are known to be difficult, are studied. The second part gives insight in professional tools and the underlying methodology, such as property checking and assertion based verification. Finally, analog components have to be considered to cope with complete system on chip designs.