Formal Property Verification for Early Discovery of Functional Flaws in Digital Designs: A Designer's Guide

Rising digital design complexity and demands for a shorter time to market increasingly challenge functional correctness. Formal verification can prevent flaws due to ambiguities and hard-to-find corner case issues. However, it is primarily attributed to verification engineers and formal experts. We consider that (a) Formal Property Verification (FPV) for sanity checking can contribute to finding flaws early, and (b) more guidance can promote a higher adoption rate by designers. Thus, we propose a concise, tool-agnostic, and flow-chart-based methodology to demystify FPV from a designer's perspective. We showcase the flow in two case studies using designs with different formal suitability, walk through the parts & phases to make the steps more tangible, and point out the limitations.