Source-Level Transformations for Improved Formal Verification

A major obstacle to widespread acceptance of formal verification is the difficulty in using the tools effectively. Although learning the basic syntax and operation of a formal verification tool may be easy, expert users are often able to accomplish a verification task while a novice user encounters time-out or space-out attempting the same task. In this paper, we assert that often a novice user will model a system in a different manner -- semantically equivalent, but less efficient for the verification tool -- than an expert user would, that some of these inefficient modeling choices can be easily detected at the source-code level, and that a robust verification tool should identify these inefficiencies and optimize them, thereby helping to close the gap between novice and expert users. To test our hypothesis, we propose some possible optimizations for the Mur verification system, implement the simplest of these, and compare the results on a variety of examples written by both experts...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICCD
• Authors: Brian D. Winters, Alan J. Hu
• Keywords: Formal Verification, Hardware, ICCD 2000, Novice Users, Verification Tool