Formal Analysis and Verification of an OFDM Modem Design using HOL

In this paper we formally specify and verify an implementation of the IEEE802.11a standard physical layer based OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modem using the HOL (Higher Order Logic) theorem prover. The versatile expressive power of HOL helped model the original design at all abstraction levels starting from a floating-point model to the fixed-point design and then synthesized and implemented in FPGA technology. The paper also investigates the rounding error accumulated during ideal real to floating-point and fixedpoint transitions at the algorithmic level.