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MATHEON-D17: Chip Design Verification

Chip Design Verification with Constraint Integer Programming

Description

 

In the design process of integrated circuits and other electronic hardware, a huge amount of time and resources is spent on the verification of the design and the final prototype. A process called "property checking" is used to validate certain expected inherent properties of a chip design.

Today's techniques validate these properties on the gate level by transforming the property checking problem into a satisfiability problem and using state-of-the-art SAT solvers. However, these techniques stumble across complexity troubles for certain classes of chip designs.

The goal of this project is to apply property checking at a higher level (the "register transfer level") to be able to exploit the structure of the chip design in a more reasonable way. Instead of SAT techniques, a mixture of Constraint Programming and Integer Programming is used to tackle the design classes that are too complex for the currently used gate level approach.

A second goal of the project is to further develop our Constraint Integer Programming and Linear Programming software, which is already used by a number of other projects in and outside Matheon and ZIB.

  Further information is available in the detailed project description.

Contact

  Stefan Heinz

Members

  Tobias Achterberg
Martin Grötschel
Stefan Heinz
Thorsten Koch

Partners

 

Funding

  DFG Research Center Matheon "Mathematics for key technologies: Modelling, simulation, and optimization of real-word processes."

Duration

  06/2006 - 04/2009