Integrating formal property verification (FPV) into an existing design process raises several interesting questions. Have I written enough properties? Have I written a consistent set of properties? What should I do when the FPV tool runs into capacity issues? This book develops the answers to these questions and fits them into a roadmap for formal property verification - a roadmap that shows how to glue FPV technology into the traditional validation flow. A Roadmap for Formal Property Verification explores the key issues in this powerful technology through simple examples - you do not need any background on formal methods to read most parts of this book.

Integrating formal property verification (FPV) into an existing design process raises several interesting questions. Have I written enough properties? Have I written a consistent set of properties? What should I do when the FPV tool runs into capacity issues? This book develops the answers to these questions and fits them into a roadmap for formal property verification a roadmap that shows how to glue FPV technology into the traditional validation flow. A Roadmap for Formal Property Verification explores the key issues in this powerful technology through simple examples you do not need any background on formal methods to read most parts of this book.

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Solutions to most real-world optimization problems involve a trade-off between multiple conflicting and non-commensurate objectives. Some of the most challenging ones are area-delay trade-off in VLSI synthesis and design space exploration, time-space trade-off in computation, and multi-strategy games. Conventional search techniques are not equipped to handle the partial order state spaces of multiobjective problems since they inherently assume a single scalar objective function. Multiobjective heuristic search techniques have been developed to specifically address multicriteria combinatorial optimization problems. This text describes the multiobjective search model and develops the theoretical foundations of the subject, including complexity results. The fundamental algorithms for three major problem formulation schemes, namely state-space formulations, problem-reduction formulations, and game-tree formulations are developed with the support of illustrative examples. Applications of multiobjective search techniques to synthesis problems in VLSI, and operations research are considered. This text provides a complete picture on contemporary research on multiobjective search, most of which is the contribution of the authors.

As the complexity of hardware designs is increasing rapidly day-by-day with the introduction of newer technologies, it is very important to ensure the correctness of these designs. During verification, the primary objective is to measure the coverage of the verified functionalities of a design and, hence, indicate the completeness of the verification effort. Since it is widely believed that the future of design verification lies in the co-existence of both simulation and formal property verification techniques, unifying the coverage goals for both of these contrasting verification technologies is becoming very essential. The inter-relationships among the simulation test plans, assertions and test benches are very important to the success of verification, but they are often loosely tied. In this monograph, we attempt to relate then more formally to achieve a potentially better strategy for cohesive coverage management in verification. We believe that the methods presented in this monograph will lead to wider adoption of the cohesive coverage management techniques in the design validation flow.