A refinement-based compositional reasoning framework for pipelined machine verification
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
A generic implementation model for the formal verification of networks-on-chips
Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on the ACL2 Theorem Prover and its Applications
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We describe an approach to verifying bit-level pipelined machine models using a combination of deductive reasoning and decision procedures. While theorem-proving systems such as ACL2 have been used to verify bit-level designs, they typically require extensive expert user support. Decision procedures such as those implemented in UCLID can be used to automatically and efficiently verify term-level pipelined machine models, but these models use numerous abstractions, implement a subset of the instruction set, and are far from executable. We show that by integrating UCLID with the ACL2 theorem-proving system, we can use ACL2 to reduce the proof that an executable, bit-level machine refines its instruction set architecture to a proof that a term-level abstraction of the bit-level machine refines the instruction set architecture, which is then handled automatically by UCLID. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach by applying it to verify a complex, seven-stage, bit-level interface pipelined machine model that implements 593 instructions and has features such as branch prediction, exceptions, and predicated instruction execution. Such a proof is not possible using UCLID and would require prohibitively more effort using just ACL2.