An effective guidance strategy for abstraction-guided simulation
Flavio M. De Paula, Alan J. Hu · Proceedings - ACM IEEE Design Automation Conference · 2007
Despite major advances in formal verification, simulation continues to be the dominant workhorse for functional verification. Abstraction-guided simulation has long been a promising framework for leveraging the power of formal techniques to help simulation reach difficult target states (assertion violations or coverage targets): model checking a smaller, abstracted version of the design avoids complexity blow-up, yet computes approximate distances from any state of the actual design to the target; these approximate distances are used during random simulation to guide the simulator. Unfortunately, the performance of previous work has been unreliable --- sometimes great, sometimes poor.