Re: Mark Aagaard's work on verifying pipelines

Victor Yodaiken (yodaiken@sphinx.nmt.edu)
Wed, 23 Nov 1994 09:42:50 -0700

On Nov 23, 10:05am, Miriam Leeser wrote:
>
>This approach is building infrastructure that will allow others to
>verify real pipelined circuits in the future.
>

I'd just like to clarify my argument before I bow out of this discussion.
It is not my intent to disparage the work done in hardware
verification -- in fact, I find this work to be very interesting and
important. But, I do think we should not confuse research that is aimed
at "building infrastructure" with the capacity to actually
verify significant circuits. It may well be the case that
this research "will allow others" to perform such verifications
"in the future". We shall see.

While we are at it, does anyone have some concrete information about the
types of errors that are likely to be found in circuit designs. My
unsubstantiated guess is that timing errors are far more common than
logic errors and that the growing popularity of such circuit disciplines
as asynchronous circuits and wave pipelining will only increase that share.
Do others have contrary guesses or even some hard data?