A Methodology for Hardware Verification Based on Logic Simulation.

Abstract

A logic simulator can prove the correctness of a digital circuit if it can be shown that only circuits implementing the system specification will produce particular response to a sequence of simulation commands. This style of verification has advantages over other proof methods in being readily automated and requiring less attention to the low level details of the design. It has advantages over other approaches to simulation in providing more reliable results, often at a comparable cost. This paper presents the theoretical foundations of several related approaches to circuit verification based on logic simulation. These approaches exploit the three valued modeling capability found in most logic simulators, where the third value x indicates a signal with unknown digital value. Although the circuit verification problem is NP-hard as measured in th size of the circuit description, several techniques can reduce the simulation complexity to a manageable level for many practical circuits. Keywords: Digital circuits; Computations; Verifiers; Random access memory.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1987
Accession Number
ADA188553

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  • Randal Bryant

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  • Carnegie Mellon University

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  • Advanced Electronics
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

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