Formal Verification of Superscalar Microprocessors with Multicycle Functional Units, Exceptions, and Branch Prediction

We extend the Burch and Dill flushing technique [6] for formal verification of microprocessors to be applicable to designs where the functional units and memories have multi-cycle and possibly arbitrary latency. We also show ways to incorporate exceptions and branch prediction by exploiting the properties of the logic of Positive Equality with Uninterpreted Functions [4][5]. We study the modeling of the above features in different versions of dual-issue superscalar processors.