Advanced Verification Techniques

"As chip size and complexity continues to grow exponentially, the challenges of functional verification are becoming a critical issue in the electronics industry. It is now commonly heard that logical errors missed during functional verification are the most common cause of chip re-spins, and that the costs associated with functional verification are now outweighing the costs of chip design. To cope with these challenges engineers are increasingly relying on new design and verification methodologies and languages. Transaction-based design and verification, constrained random stimulus generation, functional coverage analysis, and assertion-based verification are all techniques that advanced design and verification teams routinely use today. Engineers are also increasingly turning to design and verification models based on C/C++ and SystemC in order to build more abstract, higher performance hardware and software models and to escape the limitations of RTL HDLs. This new book, Advanced Verification Techniques, provides specific guidance for these advanced verification techniques. The book includes realistic examples and shows how SystemC and SCV can be applied to a variety of advanced design and verification tasks." - Stuart Swan

Professional Verification is a guide to advanced functional verification in the nanometer era. It presents the best practices in functional verification used today and provides insights on how to solve the problems that verification teams face. Professional Verification is based on the experiences of advanced verification teams throughout the industry, along with work done at Cadence Design Systems. Professional Verification presents a complete and detailed Unified Verification Methodology based on the best practices in use today. It also addresses topics important to those doing advanced functional verification, such as assertions, functional coverage, formal verification, and reactive testbenches.

The Accellera Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) standard is architected to scale, but verification is growing and in more than just the digital design dimension. It is growing in the SoC dimension to include low-power and mixed-signal and the system integration dimension to include multi-language support and acceleration. These items and others all contribute to the quality of the SOC so the Metric-Driven Verification (MDV) methodology is needed to unify it all into a coherent verification plan. This book is for verification engineers and managers familiar with the UVM and the benefits it brings to digital verification but who also need to tackle specialized tasks. It is also written for the SoC project manager that is tasked with building an efficient worldwide team. While the task continues to become more complex, Advanced Verification Topics describes methodologies outside of the Accellera UVM standard, but that build on it, to provide a way for SoC teams to stay productive and profitable.

This advanced textbook presents an almost complete overview of techniques for hardware verification. It covers all approaches used in existing tools, such as binary and word-level decision diagrams, symbolic methods for equivalence and temporal logic model checking, and introduces the use of higher-order logic theorem proving for verifying circuit correctness. Each chapter contains an introduction and a summary as well as a section for the advanced reader, aiding an understanding of the advantages and limitations of each technique. Backed by many examples and illustrations, this text will appeal to a broad audience, from beginners in system design to experts. XXXXXXX Neuer Text This is a complete overview of existing techniques for hardware verification. It covers all approaches used in existing verification tools, such as symbolic methods for equivalence checking, temporal logic model checking, and higher-order logic theorem proving for verifying circuit correctness. The book helps readers to understand the advantages and limitations of each technique. Each chapter contains a summary as well as a section for the advanced reader.

Model checking is a powerful approach for the formal verification of software. It automatically provides complete proofs of correctness, or explains, via counter-examples, why a system is not correct. Here, the author provides a well written and basic introduction to the new technique. The first part describes in simple terms the theoretical basis of model checking: transition systems as a formal model of systems, temporal logic as a formal language for behavioral properties, and model-checking algorithms. The second part explains how to write rich and structured temporal logic specifications in practice, while the third part surveys some of the major model checkers available.

This book is intended as an innovative overview of current formal verification methods, combined with an in-depth analysis of some advanced techniques to improve the scalability of these methods, and close the gap between design and verification in computer-aided design. Formal Verification: Scalable Hardware Verification with Symbolic Simulation explains current formal verification methods and provides an in-depth analysis of some advanced techniques to improve the scalability of these methods and close the gap between design and verification in computer-aided design. It provides the theoretical background required to present such methods and advanced techniques, i.e. Boolean function representations, models of sequential networks and, in particular, some novel algorithms to expose the disjoint support decompositions of Boolean functions, used in one of the scalable approaches.

The three-volume set LNCS 12476 - 12478 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, ISoLA 2020, which was planned to take place during October 20–30, 2020, on Rhodes, Greece. The event itself was postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. Each volume focusses on an individual topic with topical section headings within the volume: Part I, Verification Principles: Modularity and (De-)Composition in Verification; X-by-Construction: Correctness meets Probability; 30 Years of Statistical Model Checking; Verification and Validation of Concurrent and Distributed Systems. Part II, Engineering Principles: Automating Software Re-Engineering; Rigorous Engineering of Collective Adaptive Systems. Part III, Applications: Reliable Smart Contracts: State-of-the-art, Applications, Challenges and Future Directions; Automated Verification of Embedded Control Software; Formal methods for DIStributed COmputing in future RAILway systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2012, held in Berkeley, CA, USA in July 2012. The 38 regular and 20 tool papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 185 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on automata and synthesis, inductive inference and termination, abstraction, concurrency and software verification, biology and probabilistic systems, embedded and control systems, SAT/SMT solving and SMT-based verification, timed and hybrid systems, hardware verification, security, verification and synthesis, and tool demonstration.

As design complexity in chips and devices continues to rise, so, too, does the demand for functional verification. Principles of Functional Verification is a hands-on, practical text that will help train professionals in the field of engineering on the methodology and approaches to verification.In practice, the architectural intent of a device is necessarily abstract. The implementation process, however, must define the detailed mechanisms to achieve the architectural goals. Based on a decade of experience, Principles of Functional Verification intends to pinpoint the issues, provide strategies to solve the issues, and present practical applications for narrowing the gap between architectural intent and implementation. The book is divided into three parts, each building upon the chapters within the previous part. Part One addresses why functional verification is necessary, its definition and goals. In Part Two, the heart of the methodology and approaches to solving verification issues are examined. Each chapter in this part ends with exercises to apply what was discussed in the chapter. Part Three looks at practical applications, discussing project planning, resource requirements, and costs. Each chapter throughout all three parts will open with Key Objectives, focal points the reader can expect to review in the chapter. * Takes a "holistic" approach to verification issues* Approach is not restricted to one language* Discussed the verification process, not just how to use the verification language