No abstract

Real-time systems such as medical devices, surgical robots, and microprocessors are safetycritical applications that have hard timing constraint. The correctness of real-time systems is important as the failure may result in severe consequences such as loss of money, time and human life. These real-time systems have software to control their behavior. Typically, this software has source code which is converted to object code and then executed in safety-critical embedded devices. Therefore, it is important to ensure that both source code and object code are error-free.When dealing with safety-critical systems, formal verification techniques have laid the foundation for ensuring software correctness.

Asynchronous NULL convention logic (NCL) circuits are dual-rail quasi-delay-insensitive circuits that have many applications in high radiation and extreme temperature fluctuation environments such as space exploration. Two abstraction techniques are proposed that can be used to drastically improve the efficiency and scalability of formal equivalence verification targeted at NCL circuits. The effectiveness of the abstraction techniques have been demonstrated using a number of multiply and accumulate circuit benchmarks.