Abstract

Digital systems are becoming very large and complex making the process of finding bugs and design validation in early stages of the design cycle a must. As a contribution towards catching this goal, the propose in this thesis an approach to interface Abstract State Machines (ASNI) with Multiway Decision Graphs (MDG) to enable tool support for the formal verification of ASM descriptions. ASM is a specification method for software and hardware providing a powerful means of modeling various kinds of systems. MDGs are used for modeling hardware systems. Both ASM and MDG are based on a subset of many-sorted first order logic, making it appealing to link these two concepts. The proposed interface uses two steps: first, the ASM model is transformed into a flat, simple transition system as an intermediate model. Second, this intermediate model is transformed into the syntax of the input language of the MDG tool, MDG-HDL. We consider both structural and behavioral models of hardware. We have applied this transformation schema on some examples and case studies where our tool generates the corresponding MDG-HDL models automatically.