A methodology for system-level design for verifiability

Working at system level is attracting increasing interest. New issues must be taken into account, such as validation and verification at all steps. This paper presents a system-level design methodology that supports verification. Starting from a description in a proper subset of VHDL, a Petri Net description is obtained and used for validation purposes and for building the corresponding automaton. An efficient BDD-based tool for Process Algebra manipulation supports formal equivalence proofs. Experimental results show that the approach is feasible also for real-size industrial cases.