Environment synthesis for compositional model checking

Abstract

Modeling the environment of a design module under verification is a known practical problem in compositional verification. In this paper, we propose an approach to translate an ACTL specification into such an environment. Throughout the translation, we construct an efficient tableau for the full range of ACTL and synthesize the tableau into Verilog HDL behavior level program. The synthesized program can be used to check the properties that the system's components must guarantee. We have used the proposed environment synthesis in the compositional verification of an ATM switch fabric from Nortel Networks. Experiments show that given the theoretical compositional verification intractable limit, we can still manage to verify industry size designs.