Generation Of A Complete Set Of Properties

Abstract: One of the problems of formal verification is that it is not functionally complete due the incompleteness of specifications. An implementation meeting an incomplete specification may still have a lot of bugs. In testing, this issue is addressed by replacing functional completeness with $\mathit{structural}$ one. The latter is achieved by generating a set of tests probing every piece of a design implementation. We show that a similar approach can be used in formal verification. The idea here is to generate a property of the implementation at hand that is not implied by the specification. Finding such a property means that the specification is not complete. If this is an $\mathit{unwanted}$ property, the implementation is buggy. Otherwise, a new specification property needs to be added. Generation of implementation properties related to different parts of the design followed by adding new specification properties produces a $\mathit{structurally}$-$\mathit{complete:specification}$. Implementation properties are built by $\mathit{partial: quantifier:elimination}$, a technique where only a part of the formula is taken out of the scope of quantifiers. An implementation property is generated by applying partial quantifier elimination to a formula defining the "truth table" of the implementation. We show how our approach works on specifications of combinational and sequential circuits.