A compositional approach for equivalence checking of sequential circuits with unknown reset state and overlapping partitions

Authors:
Gabriel P. Bischoff;Karl S. Brace;Gianpiero Cabodi
Affiliations:
Massachusetts Microprocessor Design Center, Intel Massachusetts Inc, Hudson, MA;Massachusetts Microprocessor Design Center, Intel Massachusetts Inc, Hudson, MA;Dip. di Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy
Venue:
EUROCAST'07 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Computer aided systems theory
Year:
2007

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Abstract

This paper describes novel contributions to the problem of sequential equivalence checking. We address industrial setups, where the design of VLSI chips typically requires checking the equivalence of an RTL model (the specification) and a gate level optimized circuit (the implementation). Due to the size of the overall problem, compositionality is required. The circuit must be resetable, but the reset state is not yet known when equivalence checking is performed. In this paper we discuss the conditions under which decomposed proofs of equivalence are able to infer the equivalence of the full design. Our main contributions with respect to the state of the art in this field are: (1) discussing compositionality given a 3-valued initialization scheme, (2) accepting decompositions with overlapping partitions.