Functional Verification of Arithmetic Circuits: Survey of Formal Methods

Abstract

This paper gives a brief survey of current state-of-the-art techniques for formal verification of arithmetic circuits with suggestions for future work. In contrast to standard BDD or SAT-based approach that require a reference circuit it concentrates on Symbolic Computer Algebra (SCA) and related techniques that verify the circuits w.r.t. its abstract arithmetic specification. We examine the original computer algebra method; review the algebraic techniques of forward and backward rewriting; and AIG rewriting. We also propose a "hardware rewriting" method, which replaces algebraic rewriting by hardware synthesis of the circuit under verification appended with an inverse of the circuit, expecting it to be reduced to a redundant one.