Removing concurrency for rapid functional verification

Abstract

VLSI systems are commonly specified using sequential executable functional specifications, but implemented in a highly concurrent manner. Alhough the methods to transform between the sequential specification and concurrent implementation have been well-studied, there are still substantial difficulties in verifying that the concurrent implementation corresponds to the sequential specification after low-level optimization. The majority of methods for doing this verification have focused on strong semantic models for reasoning about systems and their specifications, but these models can add significant unnecessary complexity. In this paper, we explore a weak but effective method for reasoning about implementation relations. We show how a sequential embedding of a concurrent program can be generated, and how that embedding can be used to dramatically reduce the reachable state space of the verification problem while maintaining the semantic model of interest.