A framework for asynchronous circuit modeling and verification in ACL2

Abstract

Formal verification of asynchronous circuits is known to be challenging due to highly non-deterministic behavior exhibited in these systems. One of the main challenges is that it is very difficult to come up with a systematic approach to establishing invariance properties, which are crucial in proving the correctness of circuit behavior. Non-determinism also results in asynchronous circuits having a complex state space, and hence makes the verification task much more difficult than in synchronous circuits. To ease the verification task by reducing non-determinism, and consequently reducing the complexity of the set of execution paths, we impose design restrictions to prevent communication between a module M and other modules while computations are still taking place that are internal to M. These restrictions enable our verification framework to verify loop invariants efficiently via induction and subsequently verify the functional correctness of asynchronous circuit designs. We apply a link-joint paradigm to model asynchronous circuits. Our framework applies a hierarchical verification approach to support scalability. We demonstrate our framework by modeling and verifying the functional correctness of a 32-bit asynchronous serial adder.