Control Path Oriented Verification of Sequential Generic Circuits with Control and Data Path

Usually, digital circuits are split up into control and data path as there are speciic synthesis methods for controllers and operation units. However, all known approaches to hardware veriication which make use of this fact, model the operation unit also as a nite-state machine. This leads to enormous space requirements which limit the applicability of these approaches. In order to avoid this, abstraction mechanisms can be used to map boolean tuples onto more complex data types. However, approaches to the ver-iication of generic n-bit circuits have considered so far only circuits with simple controllers, such that the veriication of only combinational circuits or special cases of sequential circuits is possible. In this paper, we present a new approach to hardware veriication which allows the veriication of generic circuits with non-trivial controllers.