Evaluatable, High-Assurance Microprocessors

The CAPS (Collins Adaptive Processing System) is a family of Rockwell Collins proprietary processors. In a multiyear IR&D effort, Rockwell Collins adapted and developed techniques that allow for formal code verification of the microcode running on members of this family. The motivation for this research was that CAPS microprocessors are used in some of the most safety-critical products that Rockwell Collins sells, and current microprocessor verification and certification techniques are extremely laborious. On this project formal verification techniques were demonstrated on examples of actual microcode. Some of this work is publically documented [Greve00a, Wilding01a]. The code verification techniques we developed for critical microcode can be generalized to other kinds of code.