In current SoCs, key infrastructure capabilities are distributed across many components and involve tight software, firmware, and hardware interaction. Examples include resets, power management, security, and more. The architectural complexity of these features often results in specification errors that when found quite late in the product life cycle are very costly to fix. This means that we have to find ways to analyze the architectural specification and not only the implementation. To address these issues, we describe a framework called iPave that supports the following capabilities: (1) A common, formal system-level specification serving as a contract between different design teams; (2) Specification analysis with focus on cross-component assumptions and dependencies; and (3) A method to reuse the specification as a global checker to assure that the implementation is compliant with the specification across all validation platforms (simulation, emulation, silicon). At the front end of this framework we have an intuitive visual formalism, iFlow, which makes it easy for architects to specify system-level protocols, while at the back end we have a new logical formalism, called Logic Sequence Diagrams (LSDs), which enables formal compliance checking across different validation platforms.

Clock gating has become a standard practice for saving dynamic power in the clock network. Due to design reuse, it is common to find designs that have already some partial clock gating. We propose to exploit the existing clock gating in order to extract stronger gating conditions for blocks that are poorly gated or not gated at all. A second contribution of our paper is a robust and scalable approach to extract stability conditions for clock gating. Finally, we present a uniform treatment of unobservability and stability as dual approaches for propagating gating conditions forward and backward. Experimental results demonstrate significant power reduction (in the range of 14% -- 55% of the clock power) on Intel micro-processor designs.

The most successful technologies for automatic verification of large industrial circuits are bounded model checking, abstraction, and iterative refinement. Previous work has demonstrated the ability to verify circuits with thousands of state elements achieving bounds of at most a couple of hundreds. In this paper we present several novel techniques for abstraction-based bounded model checking. Specifically, we introduce a constant-propagation technique to simplify the formulas submitted to the CNF SAT solver; we present a new proof-based iterative abstraction technique for bounded model checking; and we show how the two techniques can be combined. The experimental results demonstrate our ability to handle circuit with several thousands state elements reaching bounds nearing 1,000.

This work describes an algorithm of automata construction for LTL safety properties, suitable for bounded model checking. Existing automata construction methods are tailored to BDD-based symbolic model checking. The novelty of our approach is that we construct deterministic automata, unlike the standard approach, which constructs nondeterministic automata. We show that the proposed method has significant advantages for bounded model checking over traditional methods.