Automatic formal verification of clock domain crossing signals

Abstract

In this paper, we present an approach that uses formal methods to verify Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) issues in a fully automatic way. First, we discuss various CDC schemes and the corresponding checks that need to be formally verified. Then we demonstrate how to synthesize them into assertion logic. After that a fully automatic, on-the-fly formal CDC approach is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper discussing fully automatic, on-the-fly formal verification of CDC signals. Experiment results show that our automatic formal CDC, when compared with the conventional post-CDC formal CDC, takes much less time, but still prove significant number of CDC checks. © 2009 IEEE.