Design Exploration through Model Checking

In recent years, the technique of symbolic model checking has proven itself to
be extremely useful in the verification of hardware. However, after almost a decade, the
use of model-checking techniques is still considered complicated, and is usually left for
the experts. In this paper we address the question of how model-checking techniques can
be made more accessible to the hardware designer community. We introduce the concept
of exploration through model-checking, and demonstrate how, when differently tuned, the
known techniques can be used to easily obtain interesting traces out of the model, rather than
used for the discovery of hard-to-find bugs. We present a set of algorithms, which support
the exploration flavor of model checking.

By: Shoham Ben-David/Haifa/IBM, Anna Gringauze/Haifa/IBM, Sharon Keidar/Haifa/IBM, Baruch Sterin/Haifa/IBM, Yaron Wolfsthal/Haifa/IBM

Published in: TR88.390 in 2001

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