Hardware Verification

Abstract

The need for verification of hardware designs is particularly important for large-scale-integration technologies because of the great cost, in time and money, for engineering changes. This correspondence describes an efficient means for determining the equivalence of a behavioral, high-level, i.e., flowchart, definition of the design and a detailed regular logic design. It may be used between compatible high-level as well as low-level designs. A compiler RTRAN transforms the high-level to a low-level design and a program VERIFY determines the equivalence of two such regular logic designs. It seeks to compute a counterexample, starting at the outputs, rather than to try exhaustively input patterns. Experimentally, VERIFY is proven vastly superior to exhaustive simulation. These methods have been used routinely for very large designs.