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Automatic Formal Verification of Fused-Multiply-Add FPUs
Munich, Germany March 07-March 11
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/DATE.2005.75Design, Automation and Test in Europe ...
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Christian Jacobi, IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH, Boeblingen, Germany
Kai Weber, IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH, Boeblingen, Germany
Viresh Paruthi, IBM Systems Group, Austin, TX
Jason Baumgartner, IBM Systems Group, Austin, TX
In this paper we describe a fully-automated methodology for formal verification of fused-multiply-add floating point units (FPUs). Our methodology verifies an implementation FPU against a simple reference model derived from the processor's architectural specification, which may include all aspects of the IEEE specification including denormal operands and exceptions. Our strategy uses a combination of BDD- and SAT-based symbolic simulation. To make this verification task tractable, we use a combination of case-splitting, multiplier isolation, and automatic model reduction techniques. The case-splitting is defined only in terms of the reference model, which makes this approach easily portable to new designs. The methodology is directly applicable to multi-GHz industrial implementation models (e.g., HDL or gate-level circuit representations) that contain all details of the high-performance transistor-level model, such as aggressive pipelining, clocking, etc. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the computational efficiency of this approach.
Citation:
Christian Jacobi, Kai Weber, Viresh Paruthi, Jason Baumgartner, "Automatic Formal Verification of Fused-Multiply-Add FPUs," date, vol. 2, pp.1298-1303, Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE'05) Volume 2, 2005
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