Formal Verification of Hardware Synthesis

Thomas Braibant, Adam Chlipala. Formal Verification of Hardware Synthesis. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV'13). July 2013.

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We report on the implementation of a certified compiler for a high-level hardware description language (HDL) called Fe-Si (FEath-erweight SynthesIs). Fe-Si is a simplified version of Bluespec, an HDL based on a notion of guarded atomic actions. Fe-Si is defined as a dependently typed deep embedding in Coq. The target language of the compiler corresponds to a synthesisable subset of Verilog or VHDL. A key aspect of our approach is that input programs to the compiler can be defined and proved correct inside Coq. Then, we use extraction and a Verilog back-end (written in OCaml) to get a certified version of a hardware design.

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