ILA-MCM: Integrating Memory Consistency Models with Instruction-Level Abstractions for Heterogeneous System-on-Chip Verification

Publication
In Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design

Modern Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) integrate heterogeneous compute elements ranging from non-programmable specialized accelerators to programmable CPUs and GPUs. To ensure correct system behavior, SoC verification techniques must account for inter-component interactions through shared memory, which necessitates reasoning about memory consistency models. This paper presents ILA-MCM, a symbolic reasoning framework for automated SoC verification, where MCMs are integrated with Instruction-Level Abstractions (ILAs) that have been proposed to model architecture-level program-visible states and state updates in heterogeneous SoC components. ILA-MCM enables reasoning about system-wide properties that depend on functional state updates as well as ordering relations between them.

Hongce Zhang
Hongce Zhang
Assistant Professor in Microelectronics Thrust

My research interest is on hardware formal verification.