Formal Verification of Optimizing Transformations during High-level Synthesis

Abstract

Translation validation is the process of proving that the target code is a correct translation of the source program being compiled. In this work, we propose a translation validation method to verify code motion transformations involving loops applied during the scheduling phase of high-level synthesis (HLS). Our method is capable of ignoring false computations during translation validation. In this work, we show that how to generate a counter-trace (cTrace) using the internal information of verifier in the case of non-equivalence reported by a translation validation method. We also show how a Bounded Model Checker (CBMC) can be used to find a counterexample for a given cTrace. Experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of our method.