CoSA: Integrated Verification for Agile Hardware Design
Cristian Mattarei, Makai Mann, Clark Barrett, Ross Daly, Dillon Huff, Pat Hanrahan · 2018
Symbolic model-checking is a well-established technique used in hardware design to assess, and formally verify, functional correctness. However, most modern model-checkers encode the problem into propositional satisfiability (SAT) and do not leverage any additional information beyond the input design, which is typically provided in a hardware description language such as Verilog.In this paper, we present CoSA (CoreIR Symbolic Analyzer), a model-checking tool for CoreIR designs. CoreIR is a new intermediate representation for hardware. CoSA encodes model-checking queries into first-order formulas that can be solved by Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers. In particular, it natively supports encodings using the theories of bitvectors and arrays. CoSA is closely integrated with CoreIR and can thus leverage CoreIR-generated metadata in addition to user-provided lemmas to assist with formal verification. CoSA supports multiple input formats and provides a broad set of analyses including equivalence checking and safety and liveness verification. CoSA is open-source and written in Python, making it easily extendable.