A survey of techniques for formal verification of combinational circuits

Abstract

With the increase in the complexity of present day systems, proving the correctness of a design has become a major concern. Simulation based methodologies are generally inadequate to validate the correctness of a design with a reasonable confidence. More and more designers are moving towards formal methods to guarantee the correctness of their designs. The authors survey some state-of-the-art techniques used to perform automatic verification of combinational circuits. They classify the current approaches for combinational verification into two categories: functional and structural. The functional methods consist of representing a circuit as a canonical decision diagram. Two circuits are equivalent if and only if their decision diagrams are equal. The structural methods consist of identifying related nodes in the circuit and using them to simplify the problem of verification. They briefly describe some of the methods in both the categories and discuss their merits and drawbacks.