| The rapid development of VLSI technology forces companies to
develop more and more complex digital circuits in less and less
time. For this goal it is also necessary to ensure the newly
developed circuits are logically correct.
Siemens central R\&D laboratories built a Circuit Verification
Environment (CVE) on new principles. CVE computes the output
behaviour of a digital circuit as Boolean functions of the
inputs. Sequential circuits are treated as finite automata.
The computed functions are symbolically compared to the corresponding
functions of a circuit specification using special, efficient
algorithms which guarantee that all differences are detected.
CVE guarantees 100\% security since the symbolic comparison
is equivalent to simulating a circuit with all possible input
patterns and verifying all simulation outputs. CVE can also
replace many time consuming logic simulations with one single
automatic comparison and thus save valuable development time.
CVE is implemented in IF/Prolog V5.0 and C.
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