Unbounded scalable verification based on approximate property-directed reachability and datapath abstraction

Abstract

This paper introduces the Averroes formal verification system which exploits the power of two complementary approaches: counter-example-guided abstraction and refinement (CEGAR) of the design's datapath and the recently-introduced IC3 and PDR approximate reachability algorithms. Averroes is particularly suited to the class of hardware designs consisting of wide datapaths and complex control logic, a class that covers a wide spectrum of design styles that range from general-purpose microprocessors to special-purpose embedded controllers and accelerators. In most of these designs, the number of datapath state variables is orders of magnitude larger than the number of control state variables. Thus, for purposes of verifying the correctness of the control logic (where most design errors typically reside), datapath abstraction is particularly effective at pruning away most of a design's state space leaving a much reduced "control space" that can be efficiently explored by the IC3 and PDR method. Preliminary experimental results on a suite of industrial benchmarks show that Averroes significantly outperforms verification at the bit level. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical demonstration of the possibility of automatic scalable unbounded sequential verification. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.