Higher order logic and hardware verification

Abstract

This 1993 book shows how formal logic can be used to specify the behaviour of hardware designs and reason about their correctness. A primary theme of the book is the use of abstraction in hardware specification and verification. The author describes how certain fundamental abstraction mechanisms for hardware verification can be formalised in logic and used to express assertions about design correctness and the relative accuracy of models of hardware behaviour. His approach is pragmatic and driven by examples. He also includes an introduction to higher-order logic, which is a widely used formalism in this subject, and describes how that formalism is actually used for hardware verification. The book is based in part on the author's own research as well as on graduate teaching. Thus it can be used to accompany courses on hardware verification and as a resource for research workers.