The Application of Program Verification to Hardware Verification

Abstract

The growing complexity of machine designs and costs of engineering changes are increasing the demand for tools and methods to detect errors earlier in the hardware development cycle. Because of similar concerns in the development of software there has been a great deal of work on methods for proving that a program satisfies a given specification. This paper examines one such program verification technique, based on the notion of symbolic execution , and then explores its application to the problem of establishing the correct behavior of a piece of hardware.