Reachability analysis for formal verification of SystemC

Abstract

With ever increasing design sizes, verification becomes the bottleneck in modem design flows. Up to 80% of the overall costs are due to the verification task. Formal methods have been proposed to overcome the limitations of simulation approaches. But these techniques have mainly been applied to lower levels of abstraction. With more and more design complexity the need for hardware description languages with a high level of abstraction becomes obvious. We present a formal verification approach for circuits described in SystemC, an extension of C that allows the modeling of hardware. An algorithm for reachability analysis is proposed and a case study of a scalable bus arbiter cell is given.