An Engineering Approach to Formal Digital System Design

This paper describes a first attempt at building design tools that amalgamate theorem proving and engineering methods. To gain acceptance such a tool must focus on the engineering task and proof steps must be hidden. From these ideas a prototype system based on the HOL proof assistant has been designed. The key features of this system are threefold. First, we use window reasoning for modelling the design process; Second, we have defined a set of application specific derived inference rules that implement common design tasks; Third, we have extended the design representation in logic with annotations to support efficient algorithmic reasoning.