Verification of Asynchronous and Parametrized Hardware Designs

Formal verification, modelling hardware design, clock domain crossing, parametrized hardware design, counter automata.

Two original approaches to formal verification of hardware designs are introduced. In particular, we aim at model checking of circuits with multiple clocks and verification of parametrized hardware designs. Considering the former contribution, we introduce four methods which we use for modelling the clock domain crossing of a circuit. Models derived in such a way can then be model checked as usual while possible problems stemming from the synchronization within a circuit are implicitly covered. Four proposed ways of modelling a data transfer differ in their precision and the incurred verification cost. In the latter contribution, our proposed approach of verification is based on a translation of parametrized hardware designs to counter automata and on exploiting the recent advances achieved in the area of their automated formal verification. A parametrized hardware design translated to a counter automaton can be verified for all possible values of parameters at once.