Hardware verification, Boolean logic programming, Boolean functional programming

One of the main obstacles to automatic verification of finite state systems (FSSs) is state explosion. In this respect automatic verification of an FSS M using model checking and binary decision diagrams (BDDs) has an intrinsic limitation: no automatic global optimization of the verification task is possible until a BDD representation for M is generated. This is because systems and specifications are defined using different languages. To perform global optimization before generating a BDD representation for M we propose to use the same language to define systems and specifications. We show that first order logic on a Boolean domain yields an efficient functional programming language that can be used to represent, specify and automatically verify FSSs, e.g. on a SUN Sparc Station 2 we were able to automatically verify a 64 bit commercial multiplier.