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 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.

This book provides readers with a comprehensive introduction to the formal verification of hardware and software. World-leading experts from the domain of formal proof techniques show the latest developments starting from electronic system level (ESL) descriptions down to the register transfer level (RTL). The authors demonstrate at different abstraction layers how formal methods can help to ensure functional correctness. Coverage includes the latest academic research results, as well as descriptions of industrial tools and case studies.

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 is about formal veri?cation, that is, the use of mathematical reasoning to ensure correct execution of computing systems. With the increasing use of c- puting systems in safety-critical and security-critical applications, it is becoming increasingly important for our well-being to ensure that those systems execute c- rectly. Over the last decade, formal veri?cation has made signi?cant headway in the analysis of industrial systems, particularly in the realm of veri?cation of hardware. A key advantage of formal veri?cation is that it provides a mathematical guarantee of their correctness (up to the accuracy of formal models and correctness of r- soning tools). In the process, the analysis can expose subtle design errors. Formal veri?cation is particularly effective in ?nding corner-case bugs that are dif?cult to detect through traditional simulation and testing. Nevertheless, and in spite of its promise, the application of formal veri?cation has so far been limited in an ind- trial design validation tool ?ow. The dif?culties in its large-scale adoption include the following (1) deductive veri?cation using theorem provers often involves - cessive and prohibitive manual effort and (2) automated decision procedures (e. g. , model checking) can quickly hit the bounds of available time and memory. This book presents recent advances in formal veri?cation techniques and d- cusses the applicability of the techniques in ensuring the reliability of large-scale systems. We deal with the veri?cation of a range of computing systems, from - quential programsto concurrentprotocolsand pipelined machines.

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

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.