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ABD - Conclusion

ABD today is often focussed on safety and liveness properties of systems and formal specifications of the protocols at the ports of a system. However, there are many other useful properties we might want to ensure or reason about, such as those involving counting and/or data conservation. These are less-well embodied in contemporary tools.

PSL deals with concrete values rather than symbolic values. Many interesting properties relate to symbolic data (e.g. specifying the correct behaviour of a FIFO buffer). Using PSL, all symbolic tokens must be wrapped up in the modelling layer which is not the core language.

Formal methods are taking over from simulation, with the percentage of bugs being found by formal methods growing. However, there is a lack of formal design entry. Low-level languages such as Verilog do not seamlessly mix with automatic synthesis from formal specification and so double-entry of designs is common.


33: (C) 2008-15, DJ Greaves, University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory.