Formal verification best practices: investigating a deadlock

By _Codasip Blog

September 26, 2023

In our first episode from last week we focused on best practices when setting up formal verification on a component. Our setup is now ready with protocol checkers to avoid unrealistic scenarios (which also helped find a new bug), and with basic abstractions to improve performances. It’s now time to tackle our real task: reproducing a deadlock bug found using simulation. Let’s dive deep into it.

Reproducing the deadlock bug

To ensure a design is deadlock free, one approach consists in verifying that it is “always eventually” able to respond to a request. The wording is important. Regardless of the current state and the number of cycles we must wait, in the future the design must respond.

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