Formal Verification ATPG Search Engine Emulator (Abstract Only)

Abstract

Bounded Model Checking (BMC), as a formal method of verifying VLSI circuits, shows violation of a given circuit property by finding a counter-example to the property along bounded state paths of the circuit. In this paper, we present an emulation framework for Automatic Test Pattern Generation (ATPG)-BMC model capable of checking properties on gate-level design. In our approach, counterpart to a property is mapped into a structural monitor with one output. A target fault is then injected at the monitor output, and a modified ATPG-based state justification algorithm is used to find a test for this fault which corresponds to formally establishing the property. In this paper, emulating the process of ATPG-based BMC on reconfigurable hardware is presented. The ATPG-BMC emulator achieves a speed-up over software based methods, due to the fine-grain massive parallelism inherent to hardware. As circuit sizes approach limits of even ATPG-based method feasibility, further solutions are required. In this presentation, we propose an ATPG-based algorithm for formal verification implementation on reconfigurable hardware (FPGA). This implementation is shown to have a linear relationship between the size of the circuit being verified and FPGA resource utilization. This implies a reasonable bound on the size of the implementation, as opposed to an exponential utilization explosion as circuit size increases. This method has also been shown to be 3 orders of magnitude faster than a similar software-based approach, based on the time for solving a given ATPG problem. At the same time, though, total runtime for the FPGA emulation based implementation is significantly limited by the parts of its process still in software. Further enhancement is proposed to reduce this overhead and increase the benefit over software solvers.