Increasing the deducibility in CNF instances for efficient SAT-based bounded model checking

• Published in: Tenth IEEE International High-Level Design Validation and Test Workshop, 2005 pp. 184 - 191
• Main Authors: Vimjam, V.C., Hsiao, M.S.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2005
• Subjects: Binary decision diagrams; Computer bugs; Encoding; Engines; Hardware; Logic design; Monitoring; Sequential circuits
• ISBN: 0780395719; 9780780395718
• ISSN: 1552-6674; 2471-7827
• DOI: 10.1109/HLDVT.2005.1568835

In this paper, we propose low-cost static deduction techniques by combining binary resolution and static logic implications to efficiently extract invariant relations from a gate-level netlist. We show that processing our techniques across the circuit nodes helps us to learn highly nontrivial relations. All the relations learned in a user-defined finite window are then quickly replicated over the entire bound for BMC. These powerful relations, when added as new constraint clauses to the original formula, help to significantly increase the deductive power for the SAT engine, thereby pruning a larger portion of the search space. Experimental results on ISCAS89 and ITC99 benchmarks show that more than an order of magnitude performance improvement can be obtained using the proposed learning techniques.