Design verification problems: test to the rescue?

Recently, assertion based verification or property checking has become of great interest to the industry. Property checkers attempt either to prove that a specified property, which stipulates expected design behavior, holds or, if the property does not hold, to generate a counter-example that demonstrates a violation of the property. This is another area where there have been some promising successes in recent years, with sequential ATPG techniques finding their way into commercial property checking tools.