Abstraction Refinement

Abstract

Formal property verification exhaustively verifies logic designs against some desired properties of the designs with respect to all possible input sequences of any length. Without abstraction, state-of-the-art formal proof engines usually cannot verify properties of designs with more than a couple of hundred registers. As a result, formal property verification relies on automatic abstraction techniques to verify real-world logic designs.

Abstraction refinement, first introduced by Kurshan in the tool COSPAN, is one of the most practical automatic abstraction methods. Abstraction refinement incrementally refines an abstract model of the design by including more and more detail from the original design until the underlying formal property verification engine verifies or falsifies the property.

In this talk we give an overview to some of the most interesting abstraction refinement techniques that have enabled the formal verification of VLSI logic designs with millions of logic gates.