Functional approaches applied to microprogrammed architectures

D. Borrione (1) , P. Camurati (2) , P. Prinetto (2) , J.-L. Paillet (2)

1 TIMA - Techniques de l'Informatique et de la Microélectronique pour l'Architecture des systèmes intégrés
2 Polito - Politecnico di Torino = Polytechnic of Turin

Zero-defect designs are the goal of current research activities in CAD. An increasingly popular avenue of attack is formal verification of hardware correctness. Formal verification techniques have been applied widely in the past, but most of the examples were either simple or verification-oriented. This paper presents the application of such techniques to a real microprogrammed microprocessor, the MTI. Some abstract views of the device are identified, and the upper levels, namely, the machine instruction and microprogram levels, are described and verified within a functional framework. A methodology that is general and applicable to state-of-the-art microprogrammed architectures is a by-product of this work.

Mots clés: machine-instruction-level; zero-defect-designs; microprogrammed-architectures; CAD-; formal-verification; hardware-correctness; microprogrammed-microprocessor; MTI-; microprogram-levels; functional-framework

Domaines: Micro et nanotechnologies/Microélectronique

D. Borrione, P. Camurati, P. Prinetto, J.-L. Paillet. Functional approaches applied to microprogrammed architectures. Interntional-Journal-of-Computer-Aided-VLSI-Design, 1990, 2(4), pp.339-58. ⟨hal-00014302⟩