METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MEMORY ABSTRACTION AND FOR WORD LEVEL NET LIST REDUCTION AND VERIFICATION USING SAME

摘要

A computer implemented representation of a circuit design including memory is abstracted to a smaller netlist by replacing memory with substitute nodes representing selected slots in the memory, segmenting word level nodes, including one or more of the substitute nodes, in the netlist into segmented nodes, finding reduced safe sizes for the segmented nodes and generating an updated data structure representing the circuit design using the reduced safe sizes of the segmented nodes. The correctness of such systems can require reasoning about a much smaller number of memory entries and using nodes having smaller bit widths than exist in the circuit design. As a result, the computational complexity of the verification problem is substantially reduced.