2 research outputs found
A Faithful Semantics for Generalised Symbolic Trajectory Evaluation
Generalised Symbolic Trajectory Evaluation (GSTE) is a high-capacity formal
verification technique for hardware. GSTE uses abstraction, meaning that
details of the circuit behaviour are removed from the circuit model. A
semantics for GSTE can be used to predict and understand why certain circuit
properties can or cannot be proven by GSTE. Several semantics have been
described for GSTE. These semantics, however, are not faithful to the proving
power of GSTE-algorithms, that is, the GSTE-algorithms are incomplete with
respect to the semantics.
The abstraction used in GSTE makes it hard to understand why a specific
property can, or cannot, be proven by GSTE. The semantics mentioned above
cannot help the user in doing so. The contribution of this paper is a faithful
semantics for GSTE. That is, we give a simple formal theory that deems a
property to be true if-and-only-if the property can be proven by a GSTE-model
checker. We prove that the GSTE algorithm is sound and complete with respect to
this semantics
GSTE is partitioned model checking
Verifying whether an ω-regular property is satisfied by a finite-state system is a core problem in model checking. Standard techniques build an automaton with the complementary language, compute its product with the system, and then check for emptiness. Generalized symbolic trajectory evaluation (GSTE) has been recently proposed as an alternative approach, extending the computationally efficient symbolic trajectory evaluation (STE) to general ω-regular properties. In this paper, we show that the GSTE algorithms are essentially a partitioned version of standard symbolic model-checking (SMC) algorithms, where the partitioning is driven by the property under verification. We export this technique of property-driven partitioning to SMC and show that it typically does speed up SMC algorithm