Combining Decision Diagrams and SAT Procedures for Efficient Symbolic Model Checking

In this paper we show how to do symbolic model checking using Boolean Expression Diagrams (BEDs), a non-canonical representation for Boolean formulas, instead of Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), the traditionally used canonical representation. The method is based on standard fixed point algorithms, combined with BDDs and SAT-solvers to perform satisfiability checking. As a result we are able to model check systems for which standard BDD-based methods fail. For example, we model check a liveness property of a 256 bit shift-and-add multiplier and we are able to find a previously undetected bug in the specification of a 16 bit multiplier. As opposed to Bounded Model Checking (BMC) our method is complete in practice. Our technique is based on a quantification procedure that allows us to eliminate quantifiers in Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBF). The basic step of this procedure is the up-one operation for BEDs. In addition we list a number of important optimizations to reduce the number of basic steps.