Formal Specification and Verification of Communication in Network-On-Chip: An Overview

Network-On-Chip (NOC) is an emerging paradigm to surmount traditional bus based Systems-On-Chip (SOC) limits  especially scalability and communication performances. A NOC includes many applications that can execute concurrently. This situation may show some undesirable behaviors such as deadlock, livelock, starvation, etc. On the other hand, the application of formal methods to on-chip communication infrastructures has recieved more attention. Formal analysis of NOC communication will be very advantageous since it allows proving some theorems or interesting qualitative/quantitative properties on the communication behavior where simulation/emulation techniques can fail easily. In this paper we try to giva an overview of the most famous formal methods applied to the verification of communication inside NOCs.