An Effective Guidance Strategy for Abstraction-Guided Simulation

tive Guidance Strategy for Abstraction-Guided Simulation Flavio M. De Paula Alan J. Hu Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, {depaulfm, ajh}@cs.ubc.ca Despite major advances in formal verification, simulation continues to be the dominant workhorse for functional verification. Abstraction-guided simulation has long been a promising framework for leveraging the power of formal techniques to help simulation reach difficult target states (assertion violations or coverage : model checking a smaller, abstracted version of the design avoids complexity blow-up, yet computes approximate distances from any state of the actual design to the target; these approximate distances are used during random simulation to guide the simulator. Unfortunately, the performance of previous work has been unreliable -- sometimes great, sometimes poor. The problem is the guidance strategy. Because the abstract distances are approximate, a greedy strategy will get stuck in local optima. ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Flavio M. de Paula, Alan J. Hu
• Keywords: Approximate Distances, DAC 2007, Design Automation, Formal Verification, Tive Guidance Strategy