Countering the Path Explosion Problem in the Symbolic Execution of Hardware Designs

04/11/2023

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by   Kaki Ryan, et al.

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Symbolic execution is a powerful verification tool for hardware designs, but suffers from the path explosion problem. We introduce a new approach, piecewise composition, which leverages the modular structure of hardware to transfer the work of path exploration to SMT solvers. We present a symbolic execution engine implementing the technique. The engine operates directly over register transfer level (RTL) Verilog designs without requiring translation to a netlist or software simulation. In our evaluation, piecewise composition reduces the number of paths explored by an order of magnitude and reduces the runtime by 97 open-source designs including an SoC and CPU.