Fast DQBF Refutation

Dependency Quantified Boolean Formulas (DQBF) extend QBF with Henkin quantifiers, which allow for non-linear dependencies between the quantified variables. This extension is useful in verification problems for incomplete designs, such as the partial equivalence checking (PEC) problem, where a partial circuit, with some parts left open as “black boxes”, is compared against a full circuit. The PEC problem is to decide whether the black boxes in the partial circuit can be filled in such a way that the two circuits become equivalent, while respecting that each black box only observes the subset of the signals that are designated as its input. We present a new algorithm that efficiently refutes unsatisfiable DQBF formulas. The algorithm detects situations in which already a subset of the possible assignments of the universally quantified variables suffices to rule out a satisfying assignment of the existentially quantified variables. Our experimental evaluation on PEC benchmarks shows that the new algorithm is a significant improvement both over approximative QBF-based methods, where our results are much more accurate, and over precise methods based on variable elimination, where the new algorithm scales better in the number of Henkin quantifiers.