Roadmap for Formal Property Verification (eBook)

The author leads the Formal Verification Group at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (http://www.facweb.iitkgp.ernet.in/~pallab/forverif.html). He has collaborations with leading companies, including Intel, Sun Microsystems, Synopsys, Texas Instruments, National Semiconductors, General Motors, Interra Systems and Virtio Corp, on developing formal methods for design verification. The author is a senior member of IEEE.

1. Introduction. 1.1. Writing our First Formal Specification. 1.2. Is my specification correct? 1.3. Have I written enough properties? 1.4. Property Verification. 1.5. Verification by Specification Refinement. 1.6. The new flow. 2. Languages for Temporal Properties. 2.1. The basic temporal operators. 2.2. Logics for temporal specification. 2.3. System Verilog Assertions. 2.4. Architectural Styles for Assertion IPs. 2.5. Concluding Remarks. 2.6. Bibliographic Notes. 3. How does the property checker work? 3.1. Checkers are state machines! 3.2. The verification strategy. 3.3. Dynamic property verification. 3.4. Formal property verification. 3.5. BDD-based Formal Property Verification. 3.6. SAT-based Formal Property Verification. 3.7. Concluding Remarks. 3.8. Bibliographic Notes. 4. Is my specification consistent? 4.1. Satisfiability and Vacuity. 4.2. Satisfiability is not enough. 4.3. Games with the Environment. 4.4. Methods for Consistency Checking. 4.5. The SpecChecker Tool. 4.6. Concluding Remarks. 4.7. Bibliographic Notes. 5. Have I written enough properties? 5.1. Simulation Coverage Metrics. 5.2. Mutation-based FPV Coverage. 5.3. Structural versus Functional Coverage. 5.4. Fault-based FPV Coverage. 5.5. Concluding Remarks. 5.6. Bibliographic Notes. 6. Design Intent Coverage. 6.1. An Introductory Example. 6.2. The Formal Problem. 6.3. The Intent Coverage Algorithm. 6.4. Soundness of the Intent Coverage Algorithm. 6.5. Multi-property representation of the coverage gap. 6.6. SpecMatcher -- The Intent Coverage Tool. 6.7. Priority Cache Access -- A closer look. 6.8. Concluding Remarks. 6.9.Bibliographic Notes 7. Test Generation Games. 7.1. Constraint Random Test Generation. 7.2. Assertions viewed as Coverage Points! 7.3. Games with the Environment 7.4. Intelligent Test Generation for Property Coverage. 7.5. The Integrated Verification Flow. 7.6. Concluding Remarks. 7.7. BibliographicNotes. 8. A Roadmap for Formal Property Verification. 8.1. Simulation-based Validation Flow. 8.2. Formal Verification Flow. 8.3. The Three Pillars. 8.4. The Integrated Flow. 8.5. Sharing the Task. 8.6. Concluding Remarks. 8.7. Bibliographic Notes. 9. References