Preface

The International Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design, FMCAD, is a series of conferences on the theory and application of formal methods to the computer-aided design and verification of hardware and systems. The twelfth conference in the series, FMCAD 2012, was held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, 22-25 October, at Microsoft´s Cambridge research laboratory. This year, the conference received in-cooperation status with ACM under the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages and the Special Interest Group on Software Engineering. It also received technical sponsorship from the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation. The Hardware Model Checking Competition (HWMCC) was co-located with the conference this year. The FMCAD 2012 conference received 71 submissions (after discounting withdrawn submissions). Each submission was reviewed by at least four reviewers, and some submissions received five or six reviews. After a long decision process that involved often vigorous discussions by Program Committee members and subreviewers, 25 submissions were eventually selected for presentation at the conference, 21 as regular papers and 4 as short papers. The accepted papers covered topics ranging from model checking and solver technology to design for verification, synthesis, debug and testing. Moreover, they addressed a broad spectrum of abstraction levels ranging and a wide variety of topics including the verification of multithreaded programs and automatic lock insertion, analog and mixed-signal systems, efficient models for large memories, symbolic synthesis of small circuits, automated debugging of missing input constraints in formal verification systems, software model checking, floating-point logic with semantic abstraction, symbolic trajectory evaluation, reachability analysis, and bounded model checking. Besides reviewed submissions, our program was enriched by four invited tutorial speakers.