Title: TLSim and EVC: a term-level symbolic simulator and an efficient decision procedure for the logic of equality with uninterpreted functions and memories

Authors: Miroslav N. Velev, Randal E. Bryant

Addresses: Consultant, USA. ' School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

Abstract: We present a tool flow for high-level design and formal verification of embedded processors. The tool flow consists of the term-level symbolic simulator TLSim, the decision procedure EVC (Equality Validity Checker) for the logic of Equality with Uninterpreted Functions and Memories (EUFM), and any SAT solver. TLSim accepts high-level models of a pipelined implementation processor and its non-pipelined specification, as well as a command file indicating how to simulate them symbolically, and produces an EUFM formula for the correctness of the implementation. EVC exploits the property of Positive Equality and other optimisations in order to translate the EUFM formula to an equivalent Boolean formula that can be solved with any SAT procedure. An earlier version of our tool flow was used to formally verify a model of the M•CORE processor at Motorola, and detected bugs.

Keywords: design automation; hardware design languages; logic; microprocessors; symbolic manipulation; symbolic simulation; embedded systems; high-level design; formal verification; processor design.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2005.008815

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2005 Vol.1 No.1/2, pp.134 - 149

Published online: 26 Jan 2006 *

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