Abstract
The need for verification of hardware designs is particularly important for large-scale-integration technologies because of the great cost, in time and money, for engineering changes. This correspondence describes an efficient means for determining the equivalence of a behavioral, high-level, i.e., flowchart, definition of the design and a detailed regular logic design. It may be used between compatible high-level as well as low-level designs. A compiler RTRAN transforms the high-level to a low-level design and a program VERIFY determines the equivalence of two such regular logic designs. It seeks to compute a counterexample, starting at the outputs, rather than to try exhaustively input patterns. Experimentally, VERIFY is proven vastly superior to exhaustive simulation. These methods have been used routinely for very large designs. Copyright © 1977 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.