Practical approaches to the automatic verification of an ATM switch fabric using VIS

In this paper we present several practical methods for formally verifying an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network switching fabric using the Verification Interacting with Synthesis (VIS) tool. We produced Verilog RTL behavioral and netlist structural descriptions of the switch fabric at different levels of hierarchy and established several abstracted models of the fabric. Using various techniques presented in the paper, we provided a number of relevant liveness and safety properties expressible in CTL, and accomplished their verification in reasonable CPU time. Moreover, we performed equivalence checking between the structural and behavioral descriptions of each submodule of the implementation hierarchy.