Introduction to Modeling for Formal Verification

Overview

This course introduces the basic concepts of functional verification and model checking, highlighting their importance in modern system designs. It explains different modeling formalisms for representing the behavior of hardware and software, which are either suitable for automated analysis or can represent data-dependent controls that are common in computing system designs. Additionally, it describes system compositions with respect to different communication models. This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA ####, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering.

Syllabus

Introduction to Model Checking

This module introduces basic concepts of functional verification and model checking. It demonstrates the importance of verification via some examples, outlines the challenges, and reviews pros and cons of model checking with respect to other verification methods.

Modeling

This module introduces transition systems, a basic modeling formalism for representing behavior of hardware and software that is suitable for automated analysis. The syntax and semantics of transition systems are explained, and how sequential circuits can be represented as transition systems is described. Next, program graphs as a formalism to model software are introduced. Syntax of program graphs is described, and semantic interpretation using transition systems is explained.

Modeling System Composition

This module introduces some modeling formalisms capturing different types of system compositions. Particularly, interleaving of concurrent transition systems, compositions of systems communicating via shared variables or handshaking are explained. Additionally, synchronous parallelism is described for composing synchronous circuit composition.