Symbolic analysis and verification of CPA descriptions

CPA is a formalism for specifying the behavior of digital systems. It describes the input/output behavior, independent of the internal structure and operation of the system. The primary use for CPA is formal verification of digital designs, in which the behavior of a design is checked for consistency against the CPA specification. This paper describes audit, a system we are developing that formally verifies a digital design against a CPA specification. The design is represented as a state machine with multi-bit data registers that can be tested and changed on the state transitions. Whereas many verification programs that work at this level expand the data part of the machine into individual states, audit treats the registers as symbolic entities and uses symbolic simulation and first-order predicate calculus to reason about their effect on the behavior of the machine. Yet unlike other symbolic simulation programs, audit can automatically analyze the behavior of simple loops and can reason about sequences of inputs and outputs.

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