A Comprehensive Survey of Hybrid Design Verification Techniques

Traditional verification by simulation has proven to be less effective given more complex and modern designs. Many recently developed formal techniques, although powerful, suffer from an inability to scale with design size. Hybrid techniques attempt to combine formal verification with simulation to overcome these inherent difficulties. This survey seeks to provide an introductory overview of current hybrid techniques coupled with complex analysis to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of these techniques for future hardware design. First a background on simulation and formal verification is given, and then a categorization of hybrid techniques is presented. Five different hybrid approaches are put forth with analysis, and finally, conclusions and future directions for hybrid techniques are discussed.