Design and verification of digital systems

Before diving into the discussion of the various verification techniques, we are going to review how digital ICs are developed. During its development, a digital design goes through multiple transformations from the original set of specifications to the final product. Each of these transformations corresponds, coarsely, to a different description of the system, which is incrementally more detailed and which has its own specific semantics and set of primitives. This chapter provides a high level overview of this design flow in the first two sections. We then review the mathematical background (Section 2.3) and cover the basic circuit structure and finite state machine definitions (Section 2.4) that are required to present the core algorithms involved in verification.