Formal verification, or specifically formal property checking, is one of those ideas in technology that, for many people, has never fully lived up to its promise. It's easy to get a sense of the origin and growth of the specific term in the technical literature by simply doing a search through the IEEE Xplore database. What you will find is that the references to the term "formal verification," which is the proof of properties on designs using logic rather than testing, dates back to the early 1980s. In fact, let's pick on the year 1982 from our database scan. This was the year that saw the introduction of the Commodore 64 personal computer and the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, as well as the emergence of a handful of academic papers that first used the term "formal verification."
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