Continued Relevance of Bit-Level Verification Research

A well-known example is the 2001 paper by the group of Sharad Malik at Princeton, appropriately titled “Chaff: Engineering an Efficient SAT Solver” [7]. This has become one of the most cited papers on formal verification and represents a major break-through, even though the contribution of this paper is not a new theoretical formulation. The contribution was in the exploitation of the synergy between algorithms and data-structures, most of which were known before. Yet this was a break-through in SAT solver technology, and was responsible for stimulating research that led to the majority of the recent successes of formal verification.