A Formal Approach to Hardware Design discusses designing computations to be realised by application specific hardware. It introduces a formal design approach based on a high-level design language called Synchronized Transitions. The models created using Synchronized Transitions enable the designer to perform different kinds of analysis and verification based on descriptions in a single language. It is, for example, possible to use exactly the same design description both for mechanically supported verification and synthesis. Synchronized Transitions is supported by a collection of public domain CAD tools. These tools can be used with the book in presenting a course on the subject. A Formal Approach to Hardware Design illustrates the benefits to be gained from adopting such techniques, but it does so without assuming prior knowledge of formal design methods. The book is thus not only an excellent reference, it is also suitable for use by students and practitioners.
The Practical, Start-to-Finish Guide to Modern Digital Design Verification As digital logic designs grow larger and more complex, functional verification has become the number one bottleneck in the design process. Reducing verification time is crucial to project success, yet many practicing engineers have had little formal training in verification, and little exposure to the newest solutions.Hardware Design Verificationsystematically presents today's most valuable simulation-based and formal verification techniques, helping test and design engineers choose the best approach for each project, quickly gain confidence in their designs, and move into fabrication far more rapidly. College students will find that coverage of verification principles and common industry practices will help them prepare for jobs as future verification engineers. Author William K. Lam, one of the world's leading experts in design verification, is a recent winner of the Chairman's Award for Innovation, Sun Microsystems' most prestigious technical achievement award. Drawing on his wide-ranging experience, he introduces the foundational principles of verification, presents traditional techniques that have survived the test of time, and introduces emerging techniques for today's most challenging designs. Throughout, Lam emphasizes practical examples rather than mathematical proofs; wherever advanced math is essential, he explains it clearly and accessibly. Coverage includes Simulation-based versus formal verification: advantages, disadvantages, and tradeoffs Coding for verification: functional and timing correctness, syntactical and structure checks, simulation performance, and more Simulator architectures and operations, including event-driven, cycle-based, hybrid, and hardware-based simulators Testbench organization, design, and tools: creating a fast, efficient test environment Test scenarios and assertion: planning, test cases, test generators, commercial and Verilog assertions, and more Ensuring complete coverage, including code, parameters, functions, items, and cross-coverage The verification cycle: failure capture, scope reduction, bug tracking, simulation data dumping, isolation of underlying causes, revision control, regression, release mechanisms, and tape-out criteria An accessible introduction to the mathematics and algorithms of formal verification, from Boolean functions to state-machine equivalence and graph algorithms Decision diagrams, equivalence checking, and symbolic simulation Model checking and symbolic computation Simply put,Hardware Design Verificationwill help you improve and accelerate your entire verification process--from planning through tape-out--so you can get to market faster with higher quality designs.
This is the first book to focus on the problem of ensuring the correctness of floating-point hardware designs through mathematical methods. Formal Verification of Floating-Point Hardware Design advances a verification methodology based on a unified theory of register-transfer logic and floating-point arithmetic that has been developed and applied to the formal verification of commercial floating-point units over the course of more than two decades, during which the author was employed by several major microprocessor design companies. The book consists of five parts, the first two of which present a rigorous exposition of the general theory based on the first principles of arithmetic. Part I covers bit vectors and the bit manipulation primitives, integer and fixed-point encodings, and bit-wise logical operations. Part II addresses the properties of floating-point numbers, the formats in which they are encoded as bit vectors, and the various modes of floating-point rounding. In Part III, the theory is extended to the analysis of several algorithms and optimization techniques that are commonly used in commercial implementations of elementary arithmetic operations. As a basis for the formal verification of such implementations, Part IV contains high-level specifications of correctness of the basic arithmetic instructions of several major industry-standard floating-point architectures, including all details pertaining to the handling of exceptional conditions. Part V illustrates the methodology, applying the preceding theory to the comprehensive verification of a state-of-the-art commercial floating-point unit. All of these results have been formalized in the logic of the ACL2 theorem prover and mechanically checked to ensure their correctness. They are presented here, however, in simple conventional mathematical notation. The book presupposes no familiarity with ACL2, logic design, or any mathematics beyond basic high school algebra. It will be of interest to verification engineers as well as arithmetic circuit designers who appreciate the value of a rigorous approach to their art, and is suitable as a graduate text in computer arithmetic.
Embedded systems are informally defined as a collection of programmable parts surrounded by ASICs and other standard components, that interact continuously with an environment through sensors and actuators. The programmable parts include micro-controllers and Digital Signal Processors (DSPs). Embedded systems are often used in life-critical situations, where reliability and safety are more important criteria than performance. Today, embedded systems are designed with an ad hoc approach that is heavily based on earlier experience with similar products and on manual design. Use of higher-level languages such as C helps structure the design somewhat, but with increasing complexity it is not sufficient. Formal verification and automatic synthesis of implementations are the surest ways to guarantee safety. Thus, the POLIS system which is a co-design environment for embedded systems is based on a formal model of computation. POLIS was initiated in 1988 as a research project at the University of California at Berkeley and, over the years, grew into a full design methodology with a software system supporting it. Hardware-Software Co-Design of Embedded Systems: The POLIS Approach is intended to give a complete overview of the POLIS system including its formal and algorithmic aspects. Hardware-Software Co-Design of Embedded Systems: The POLIS Approach will be of interest to embedded system designers (automotive electronics, consumer electronics and telecommunications), micro-controller designers, CAD developers and students.
This state-of-the-art monograph presents a coherent survey of a variety of methods and systems for formal hardware verification. It emphasizes the presentation of approaches that have matured into tools and systems usable for the actual verification of nontrivial circuits. All in all, the book is a representative and well-structured survey on the success and future potential of formal methods in proving the correctness of circuits. The various chapters describe the respective approaches supplying theoretical foundations as well as taking into account the application viewpoint. By applying all methods and systems presented to the same set of IFIP WG10.5 hardware verification examples, a valuable and fair analysis of the strenghts and weaknesses of the various approaches is given.
This book presents 8 papers accompanying the lectures of leading researchers given at the 6th edition of the International School on Formal Methods for the Design of Computer, Communication and Software Systems (SFM 2006). SFM 2006 was devoted to formal techniques for hardware verification and covers several aspects of the hardware design process, including hardware design languages and simulation, property specification formalisms, automatic test pattern generation, symbolic trajectory evaluation, and more.
This book provides an introduction to Swarm Robotics, which is the application of methods from swarm intelligence to robotics. It goes on to present methods that allow readers to understand how to design large-scale robot systems by going through many example scenarios on topics such as aggregation, coordinated motion (flocking), task allocation, self-assembly, collective construction, and environmental monitoring. The author explains the methodology behind building multiple, simple robots and how the complexity emerges from the multiple interactions between these robots such that they are able to solve difficult tasks. The book can be used as a short textbook for specialized courses or as an introduction to Swarm Robotics for graduate students, researchers, and professionals who want a concise introduction to the field.
Hardware Design and Petri Nets presents a summary of the state of the art in the applications of Petri nets to designing digital systems and circuits. The area of hardware design has traditionally been a fertile field for research in concurrency and Petri nets. Many new ideas about modelling and analysis of concurrent systems, and Petri nets in particular, originated in theory of asynchronous digital circuits. Similarly, the theory and practice of digital circuit design have always recognized Petri nets as a powerful and easy-to-understand modelling tool. The ever-growing demand in the electronic industry for design automation to build various types of computer-based systems creates many opportunities for Petri nets to establish their role of a formal backbone in future tools for constructing systems that are increasingly becoming distributed, concurrent and asynchronous. Petri nets have already proved very effective in supporting algorithms for solving key problems in synthesis of hardware control circuits. However, since the front end to any realistic design flow in the future is likely to rely on more pragmatic Hardware Description Languages (HDLs), such as VHDL and Verilog, it is crucial that Petri nets are well interfaced to such languages. Hardware Design and Petri Nets is divided into five parts, which cover aspects of behavioral modelling, analysis and verification, synthesis from Petri nets and STGs, design environments based on high-level Petri nets and HDLs, and finally performance analysis using Petri nets. Hardware Design and Petri Nets serves as an excellent reference source and may be used as a text for advanced courses on the subject.
CHARME’99 is the tenth in a series of working conferences devoted to the dev- opment and use of leading-edge formal techniques and tools for the design and veri?cation of hardware and systems. Previous conferences have been held in Darmstadt (1984), Edinburgh (1985), Grenoble (1986), Glasgow (1988), Leuven (1989), Torino (1991), Arles (1993), Frankfurt (1995) and Montreal (1997). This workshop and conference series has been organized in cooperation with IFIP WG 10. 5. It is now the biannual counterpart of FMCAD, which takes place every even-numbered year in the USA. The 1999 event took place in Bad Her- nalb, a resort village located in the Black Forest close to the city of Karlsruhe. The validation of functional and timing behavior is a major bottleneck in current VLSI design systems. A predominantly academic area of study until a few years ago, formal design and veri?cation techniques are now migrating into industrial use. The aim of CHARME’99 is to bring together researchers and users from academia and industry working in this active area of research. Two invited talks illustrate major current trends: the presentation by G ́erard Berry (Ecole des Mines de Paris, Sophia-Antipolis, France) is concerned with the use of synchronous languages in circuit design, and the talk given by Peter Jansen (BMW, Munich, Germany) demonstrates an application of formal methods in an industrial environment. The program also includes 20 regular presentations and 12 short presentations/poster exhibitions that have been selected from the 48 submitted papers.
Formal methods for hardware design still find limited use in industry. Yet current practice has to change to cope with decreasing design times and increasing quality requirements. This research report presents results from the Esprit project FORMAT (formal methods in hardware verification) which involved the collaboration of the enterprises Siemens, Italtel, Telefonica I+D, TGI, and AHL, the research institute OFFIS, and the universities of Madrid and Passau. The work presented involves advanced specification languages for hardware design that are intuitive to the designer, like timing diagrams and state based languages, as well as their relation to VHDL and formal languages like temporal logic and a process-algebraic calculus. The results of experimental tests of the tools are also presented.
