Formal verification of the Pentium(R) 4 multiplier

Abstract

We present the formal verification of the floating-point multiplier in the Intel IA-32 Pentium(R)4 microprocessor. The verification is based on a combination of theorem-proving and model-checking tasks performed in the Forte hardware verification environment. The tasks are tightly integrated to accomplish complete verification of the multiplier hardware coupled with the rounder logic. The approach does not rely on specialized representations like binary moment diagrams or its variants.