CREST: Hardware Formal Verification with ANSI-C Reference Specifications

Abstract: This paper presents CREST, a prototype front-end tool intended as an add-on to commercial EDA formal verifcation environments. CREST is an adaptation of the CBMC bounded model checker for C, an academic tool widely used in industry for software analysis and property verification. It leverages the capabilities of CBMC to process hardware datapath specifications written in arbitrary ANSI-C, without limiting restrictions to a synthesizable subset. We briefly sketch the architecture of our tool and show its use in a range of verification case studies.