Countering the Path Explosion Problem in the Symbolic Execution of Hardware Designs. (arXiv:2304.05445v1 [cs.CR])

Symbolic execution is a powerful verification tool for hardware designs, but
suffers from the path explosion problem. We introduce a new approach, piecewise
composition, which leverages the modular structure of hardware to transfer the
work of path exploration to SMT solvers. We present a symbolic execution engine
implementing the technique. The engine operates directly over register transfer
level (RTL) Verilog designs without requiring translation to a netlist or
software simulation. In our evaluation, piecewise composition reduces the
number of paths …

engine evaluation explosion hardware magnitude modular order path problem register simulation smt software symbolic execution tool verification work