A Tool for Functional Verification of System Level Model Refinements

Increase in system level modeling has given rise to a need for efficient functional validation of models above cycle accurate level. This paper presents a tool for comparing system level models, before and after a refinement. Verifiable refinements include mapping functionality in the specification to platform components, static scheduling of functions mapped to a component and routing of transactions across components. The verification tool starts by abstracting the input models into a control and data dependency graph representation. A series of functionality preserving transformations is then applied to the graphs in order to normalize them. Finally, the normalized graphs are checked for isomorphism and a decision on the equivalence of models is returned. Experimental results on industrial examples demonstrate the feasibility and the efficiency of this verification technique.