# equivalence checking of arithmetic circuits

Post on 07-Apr-2018

218 views

Category:

## Documents

Embed Size (px)

TRANSCRIPT

• 8/4/2019 Equivalence Checking of Arithmetic Circuits

1/12

586 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS, VOL. 23, NO. 5, MAY 2004

Equivalence Checking of Arithmetic Circuitson the Arithmetic Bit Level

Dominik Stoffel, Member, IEEE, and Wolfgang Kunz, Member, IEEE

AbstractOne of the most severe shortcomings of currentlyavailable equivalence checkers is their inability to verify arith-metic circuits and multipliers, in particular. In this paper, wepresent a bit-level reverse-engineering technique that comple-ments standard equivalence checking frameworks. We propose aBoolean mapping algorithm that extracts a network of half addersfrom the gate netlist of an addition circuit. Once the arithmeticbit-level representation of the circuit is obtained, equivalencechecking can be performed using simple arithmetic operations.We have successfully applied the technique for the verification ofa large number of multipliers of different architectures as well asmore general arithmetic circuits, such as multiply/add units. Theexperimental results show the great promise of our approach.

Index TermsArithmetic bit level, arithmetic circuit, datapathverification, equivalence checking, formal hardware verification,multiplier.

I. INTRODUCTION

IN RECENT years, implementation verification by equiva-

lence checking has become widely accepted. Modern equiv-

alence checkers can handle circuits with hundreds of thousands

of gates and have replaced gate-level simulation in many de-

sign flows. Equivalence checkers can perform extremely well if

the two designs to be compared contain a high degree of struc-

tural similarity. This is usually the case after a conventional syn-

thesis flow. Similarity means that the two circuits contain a lotof internal equivalences , , also called internal cut points

. Techniques to exploit these similarities have enabled equiv-

alence checkers to verify huge combinational circuits, as has

been shown by several authors . On the other hand, if

no internal equivalences exist, modern equivalence checkers fail

and even for relatively small examples verification can become

impossible.

One of the main problems encountered with equivalence

checking in industrial practice is the inability to verify integer

multipliers. The problem occurs when a register transfer level

(RT-level) description of a circuit must be compared against a

gate-level description. Typically, the latter has been generated

from the former by some synthesis tool and it is the task ofthe equivalence checker to verify this synthesis process. The

equivalence checker attempts to solve the problem by synthe-

sizing a gate-level model from the RT model and by comparing

the two gate-level designs. Unfortunately, this will fail in most

Manuscript received April 25, 2003; revised July 31, 2003 and October 8,2003.

The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engi-neering, University of Kaiserslautern, 67653 Kaiserslautern, Germany (e-mail:[email protected]).

cases. The problem is that the gate-level model generated by

the equivalence checker looks entirely different, compared

with the multiplier produced by the synthesis tool. Commercialequivalence checkers offer solutions for black-boxing multi-

pliers; however, this and related solutions are cumbersome and

may easily lead to false negatives.

Several approaches for multiplier verification can be con-

sidered. Word-level decision diagrams like binary moment

diagrams (BMDs)  have great promise because they can

efficiently represent integer multiplication. However, they

require word-level information about a design, which is often

not available and difficult to extract from a given bit-levelimplementation. Solutions based on bit-level decision diagrams

such as binary decision diagrams (BDDs), e.g., as in  and

, suffer from high complexity and may lack robustness, even

if the BDDs are not built for the circuit outputs directly, but

certain properties of the arithmetic circuits (e.g., structural

dependence ) are exploited.

An approach based on a standard equivalence checking

engine was proposed by Fujita . Some arithmetic functions

such as multiplication have special properties, which can be

expressed as recurrence equations. For the circuit to be verified,

it is checked whether the corresponding recurrence equation is

valid using a standard cut-point-based equivalence-checking

engine. The equivalence-checking problems are recursivelybroken down into smaller problems by case splitting on operand

bits. The major drawback of this interesting approach is that for

the circuit to be checked, a recurrence equation must exist and

it must be known. This hampers automation of the verification

A related approach has been pursued in  and . It

is based on using certain arithmetic relationships of the im-

plemented circuit function and, like , applies case splits on

operand bits. The method is very promising for certain classes

of circuits and makes efficient use of the circuit structure to find

the right set of operand bits and a useful order on these bits for

performing the case splits. In some cases, a good order exists

such that the subproblems created indeed exhibit a great deal ofstructural similarities, thereby significantly simplifying the ver-

ification task. However, for some architectures, such as Wallace

tree, no such order exists so that the method is not robust in some

common practical cases.

Reverse engineering could be considered as a pragmatic ap-

proach to multiplier verification. Since the number of possible

architectures for a multiplier is limited, one may incorporate

a variety of architectures in the front end of the equivalence

checker and repeat the comparison for all of them. We have not

experimented with this approach, but we believe that there are

0278-0070/04\$20.00 2004 IEEE

• 8/4/2019 Equivalence Checking of Arithmetic Circuits

2/12

STOFFEL AND KUNZ: EQUIVALENCE CHECKING OF ARITHMETIC CIRCUITS ON THE ARITHMETIC BIT LEVEL 587

Fig. 1. Multiplication example (decimal numbers).

many obstacles. Note that even within one and the same archi-tecture, e.g., a carry-save adder (CSA) array, there can be nu-

merous implementation styles that have hardly any similarity in

terms of internal equivalences. As an illustration, consider Fig. 1

showing four ways of multiplying two decimal numbers.

All four cases can be implemented by the same architec-

tures, but have no internal equivalences at all. The adder stage of

each row computes the accumulated sum of the previous rows.

The accumulated sum values are different in all four variations.

We experimentally verified the absence of internal equivalences

using the 16 16 bit multiplier c6288. We modified the circuit

by swapping its operands. Since multiplication is commutative

c6288 with swapped operands must be equivalent to the original

version. Proving this by our equivalence checker , however,

turned out to be impossible. All internal equivalences were lost,

except for the ones belonging to the partial products in the first

circuit level.

In this paper, we propose a new approach to verification of

arithmetic circuits. It can be understood as a reverse engineering

process but at a more detailed level than described above. We

propose an extraction technique which decomposes a gate netlist

of an arithmetic circuit into its smallest arithmetic units. We do

not identify word operations but bit operations and only con-

sider the addition of single bits. Our extraction technique gen-

erates an arithmetic bit-level description of the circuit. Addition

at this level is reduced to addition modulo 2 and generation ofcarry signals. The arithmetic bit level permits a very efficient

verification algorithm.

Note that there have been a few approaches reported in lit-

erature based on identifying components of arithmetic circuits.

Probably the earliest work related to the method described here

is . The technique is based on a logic-programming tool. It

is similar to the one described in this paper in the respect that a

higher-level representation of the circuit is extracted from a flat

gate-level netlist. However, the gates in the circuit are mapped to

component cells by syntactic pattern matching. The information

adders] have been used in the implementation must be given to

the tool. The obtained representation is not a formal, genericarithmetic bit-level description as in our approach, but strongly

depends on the cell types.

Identifying the components in a design can also be useful for

a hierarchical verification approach. In , hierarchical veri-

fication was proposed for circuits that cannot be verified effi-

ciently at the bit level (such as multipliers). For each compo-

nent, a BMD is constructed which can be compared against a

specification for the component. Then, the BMDs of the com-

ponents are composed and the final BMD is compared to the

overall circuit specification. In another approach , a PHDD

is constructed for the circuit in a backward circuit tra
{"ft_lang_label":"__label__en","ft_lang_prob":0.89515734,"math_prob":0.9027898,"size":9322,"snap":"2022-27-2022-33","text_gpt3_token_len":1977,"char_repetition_ratio":0.14541747,"word_repetition_ratio":0.0043541365,"special_character_ratio":0.19319889,"punctuation_ratio":0.10174782,"nsfw_num_words":0,"has_unicode_error":false,"math_prob_llama3":0.97950435,"pos_list":[0],"im_url_duplicate_count":[null],"WARC_HEADER":"{\"WARC-Type\":\"response\",\"WARC-Date\":\"2022-08-14T13:41:00Z\",\"WARC-Record-ID\":\"<urn:uuid:32360369-2a78-4274-ae8d-2e4dc4afbd77>\",\"Content-Length\":\"103495\",\"Content-Type\":\"application/http; msgtype=response\",\"WARC-Warcinfo-ID\":\"<urn:uuid:48ac3b1b-53bc-4251-ab35-db99493e3ed9>\",\"WARC-Concurrent-To\":\"<urn:uuid:a0c45b5d-b89f-42dc-9292-57bb75f82731>\",\"WARC-IP-Address\":\"104.21.72.137\",\"WARC-Target-URI\":\"https://vdocuments.net/equivalence-checking-of-arithmetic-circuits.html\",\"WARC-Payload-Digest\":\"sha1:UZU4GHVWO3EACPGW3AK6QRKMGSVFAPPW\",\"WARC-Block-Digest\":\"sha1:DUUQHRCMAPQV6ZSIIXW5DUL53N4S7K27\",\"WARC-Identified-Payload-Type\":\"text/html\",\"warc_filename\":\"/cc_download/warc_2022/CC-MAIN-2022-33/CC-MAIN-2022-33_segments_1659882572033.91_warc_CC-MAIN-20220814113403-20220814143403-00222.warc.gz\"}"}