Formal hardware/software co-verification by interval property checking with abstraction

Ensuring functional correctness of hardware and software is a bottleneck in every design process of Embedded Systems. This paper proposes an approach to formally verify low-level software in conjunction with the hardware. The proposed approach is based on Interval Property Checking (IPC) that has proved successful on large industrial hardware designs. In this paper, IPC is extended by a specific abstraction technique that makes it tractable for hardware/ software co-verification on realistic industrial designs. In the proposed methodology sets of finite state sequences of the system are abstracted by interval properties. This allows us to handle long sequences of state transitions in the hardware as they occur when running programs. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using the example of an industrial LIN software running on a public domain microprocessor platform.