ChiselFV: A Formal Verification Framework for Chisel

Abstract

Modern digital hardware is becoming ever more complex. And agile development, an efficient idea in software development, has been introduced into hardware. Furthermore, as a new hardware construction language, Chisel helps to raise the level of hardware design abstraction with the support of object-oriented and functional programming. Chisel plays a crucial role in future hardware design and open-source hardware development. However, the formal verification for Chisel is still limited. In this paper, we propose ChiselFV, a formal verification framework that has supported detailed formal hardware property descriptions and integrated mature formal hardware verification flows based on SymbiYosys. It builds on top of Chisel and uses Scala to drive the verification process. Thus the framework can be seen as an extension of Chisel. ChiselFV makes it easy to verify hardware designs formally when implementing them in Chisel.