Leveraging Critical Proof Obligations for Efficient IC3 Verification

IC3 and its variants are SAT-based model-checking methods that play a critical role in hardware verification. Efficient management of proof obligations, which track states that need to be proven unreachable, is essential for improving verification performance. This paper presents a novel approach th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	2025 62nd ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) pp. 1 - 7
Main Authors:	Zhu, Lingfeng, Zhang, Xindi, Li, Yongjian, Cai, Shaowei
Format:	Conference Proceeding
Language:	English
Published:	IEEE 22.06.2025
Subjects:	assumption core consistency Benchmark testing critical proof obligation Design automation Hardware IC3 Model checking Performance gain
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	IC3 and its variants are SAT-based model-checking methods that play a critical role in hardware verification. Efficient management of proof obligations, which track states that need to be proven unreachable, is essential for improving verification performance. This paper presents a novel approach that utilizes Critical Proof Obligations (CPOs) to improve proof obligation management. We propose two techniques, CPO-Driven UNSAT Core Generation and CPO-Driven Proof Obligation Propagation, to promote lemma propagation and frame refinement. Experimental results on HWMCC benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements in CPO discovery and lemma propagation, resulting in notable performance gains.
DOI:	10.1109/DAC63849.2025.11132734