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A Case Study in Formal Verification of Register-Transfer Logic with ACL2: The Floating Point Adder of the AMD Athlon TM Processor

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1954))

Abstract

One obstacle to mathematical verification of industrial hard- ware designs is that the commercial hardware description languages in which they are usually encoded are too complicated and poorly spec- ified to be readily susceptible to formal analysis. As an alternative to these commercial languages, AMD1 has developed an RTL language for microprocessor designs that is simple enough to admit a clear semantic definition, providing a basis for formal verification. We describe a me- chanical proof system for designs represented in this language, consisting of a translator to the ACL2 logical programming language and a method- ology for verifiying properties of the resulting programs using the ACL2 prover. As an illustration, we present a proof of IEEE compliance of the floating-point adder of the AMD Athlon processor.

AMD, the AMD logo and combinations thereof, AMD-K5, and AMD Athlon are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

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References

  1. Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, “IEEE Standard for Binary Floating Point Arithmetic”, Std. 754-1985, New York, NY, 1985.

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  7. Russinoff, D., “A Mechanically Checked Proof of IEEE Compliance of the AMD-K7 Floating Point Multiplication, Division, and Square Root Algorithms”. See http://www.onr.com/user/russ/david/k7-div-sqrt.html.

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  9. Russinoff, D., “An ACL2 Library of Floating-Point Arithmetic”, 1999. See http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/publications/others/fp-README.html.

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Russinoff, D.M. (2000). A Case Study in Formal Verification of Register-Transfer Logic with ACL2: The Floating Point Adder of the AMD Athlon TM Processor. In: Hunt, W.A., Johnson, S.D. (eds) Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design. FMCAD 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1954. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-40922-X_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-40922-X_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41219-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-40922-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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