The Application of Formal Verification to SPW Designs

The Signal Processing WorkSystem (SPW) of Cadence is an integrated framework for developing DSP and communications products. Formal verification is a complementary technique to simulation based on mathematical logic. The HOL system is an environment for interactive theorem proving in a higher-order logic. It has an open user-extensible architecture which makes it suitable for providing proof support for embedded languages. In this paper, we propose an approach to model SPW descriptions at different abstraction levels in HOL based on the shallow embedding technique. This will enable the formal verification of SPW designs which in the past could only be verified partially using conventional simulation techniques. We illustrate this novel application through a simple case study of a Notch filter