MDG Tools for the Verification of RTL Designs

State Machines. The MDG tools are intended for Abstract State Machines (ASM) verification [4, 3] rather than Finite State Machine (FSM) verification. They can be used for FSMs as well, but they are less efficient than ROBDDs for this purpose, due in part to the space requirements of our current Prolog implementation. An abstract description of a state machine, called abstract state machine (ASM) [4], is obtained by letting some data input, state or output variables be of an abstract sort, and the datapath operations be uninterpreted function symbols. Just as ROBDDs for encoding FSMs, MDGs are used to compactly represent sets of (abstract) states and transition/output relations for ASMs. The MDG tools accept as hardware description a Prolog-style HDL, MDG--HDL, which allows the use of abstract variables for representing data signals. The MDG--HDL description is then compiled into the ASM model in internal MDG data structures. MDG--HDL supports structural descriptions, behavioral ASM..

MDG Tools for the Verification of RTL Designs

Multiway Decision Graphs (MDGs) [3] have been proposed as a new kind of decision graphs to represent Register-Transfer (RT) level hardware designs. MDG-based verification techniques have been developed for combinational and sequential designs. In our presentation, we shall describe the structure of the MDG tools we implemented and demonstrate their applications on a number of benchmarks including the Fairisle 4X4 ATM switch fabric. The MDG Tools comprise an MDG package that contains basic MDG operators and an application layer that implements the verification algorithms. 1 Introduction Although ROBDDs [1, 2, 4] have proven to be a powerful tool for automated hardware verification, they require a Boolean representation of the circuit. Since the size of an ROBDD grows, sometimes exponentially, with the number of Boolean variables, ROBDD-based verification cannot be directly applied to circuits with complex datapaths. We have recently proposed a new class of decision graphs called Multiw..