arXiv:2410.18454cs.ARcs.AI2024-10

用早期软件级断言+硬件等价检查,提前发现算法设计漏洞。

Verifying Non-friendly Formal Verification Designs: Can We Start Earlier?

  • 用C++算法描述生成断言,秒级验证早期逻辑正确性
  • 通过HLEC比对算法与硬件设计,提前发现关键缺陷
  • 适合数据通路团队在RTL前做快速决策

随着SoC设计日益复杂,遗漏的错误可能导致安全关键场景下灾难性后果。为应对这一挑战,工业界采用形式化属性验证(FPV),但部分设计即使长时间运行模型检测工具仍无法得出明确结论。近年来提出使用高级等价检查(HLEC)工具,但其在工业流程中的使用方法尚未明确。为此,本文提出一种基于元建模的自动化方法:第一步,在早期使用生成断言对用C++编写的无时序算法描述进行验证,软件级断言可在秒级完成,实现早期可确定性分析;第二步,将该算法描述与后续的顺序化硬件设计通过HLEC及相应元建模参数进行比对。实验表明,该方法能有效在算法阶段发现缺陷,并为HLEC验证做好准备,显著减少手动设置工具和编写属性所带来的错误风险。该框架有助于数据通路团队在验证流程早期开展验证与决策。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The design of Systems on Chips (SoCs) is becoming more and more complex due to technological advancements. Missed bugs can cause drastic failures in safety-critical environments leading to the endangerment of lives. To overcome these drastic failures, formal property verification (FPV) has been applied in the industry. However, there exist multiple hardware designs where the results of FPV are not conclusive even for long runtimes of model-checking tools. For this reason, the use of High-level Equivalence Checking (HLEC) tools has been proposed in the last few years. However, the procedure for how to use it inside an industrial toolchain has not been defined. For this reason, we proposed an automated methodology based on metamodeling techniques which consist of two main steps. First, an untimed algorithmic description written in C++ is verified in an early stage using generated assertions; the advantage of this step is that the assertions at the software level run in seconds and we can start our analysis with conclusive results about our algorithm before starting to write the RTL (Register Transfer Level) design. Second, this algorithmic description is verified against its sequential design using HLEC and the respective metamodel parameters. The results show that the presented methodology can find bugs early related to the algorithmic description and prepare the setup for the HLEC verification. This helps to reduce the verification efforts to set up the tool and write the properties manually which is always error-prone. The proposed framework can help teams working on datapaths to verify and make decisions in an early stage of the verification flow.

形式验证算法验证HLEC

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