QF_BV Model Checking with Property Directed Reachability

Abstract

In 2011, property directed reachability (PDR) was proposed as an efficient algorithm to solve hardware model checking problems. Recent experimentation suggests that it outperforms interpolation-based verification, which had been considered the best known algorithm for this purpose for almost a decade. In this work, we present a generalization of PDR to the theory of quantifier free formulae over bitvectors (QF BV), illustrate the new algorithm with representative examples and provide experimental results obtained from experimentation with a prototype implementation.