Equivalence checking for behaviorally synthesized pipelines

Abstract

Loop pipelining is a critical transformation in behavioral synthesis. It is crucial to producing hardware designs with acceptable latency and throughput. However, it is a complex transformation involving aggressive scheduling strategies for high throughput and careful control generation to eliminate hazards. We present an equivalence checking approach for certifying synthesized hardware designs in the presence of pipelining transformations. Our approach works by (1) constructing a provably correct pipeline reference model from sequential specification, and (2) applying sequential equivalence checking between this reference model and synthesized RTL. We demonstrate the scalability of our approach on several synthesized designs from a commercial synthesis tool.