Effective Theorem Proving for Hardware Verification (original) (raw)

The Notion of Proof in Hardware Verification

2015

Recent advances in the field of hardware verification have raised some fresh (and some familiar) issues to do with the scope and limitations of formal proof. In this note, some of these are considered in the context of the Viper verification project. Viper is a microprocessor designed by W. J. Cullyer, C. Pygott and J. Kershaw, of the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment of the U.K. Ministry of Defense, for use in safety-critical applications. Much to their credit, the designers intended from the start that Viper be formally verified; they presented Viper's more abstract specifications in a language suitable for formal reasoning, and they placed the design in the public domain. Viper microprocessors are currently being marketed as verified chips. The formal proof aspects of the verication work have been carried out at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. To date, some important properties of a register-transfer level model of Viper, relative to a more abstra...

Experiments in Automating Hardware Verification Using Inductive Proof Planning

Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design, 1996

We present a new approach to automating the verification of hardware designs based on planning techniques. A database of methods is developed that combines tactics, which construct proofs, using specifications of their behaviour. Given a verification problem, a planner uses the method database to build automatically a specialised tactic to solve the given problem. User interaction is limited to specifying circuits and their properties and, in some cases, suggesting lemmas. We have implemented our work in an extension of the Clam proof planning system. We report on this and its application to verifying a variety of combinational and synchronous sequential circuits including a parameterised multiplier design and a simple computer microprocessor.