WASIM: A Word-level Abstract Symbolic Simulation Framework for Hardware Formal Verification

This paper demonstrates the design and usage of WASIM, a word-level abstract symbolic simulation framework with pluggable abstraction/refinement functions. WASIM is useful in the formal verification of functional properties on register-transfer level (RTL) hardware designs. Users can control the symbolic simulation process and tune the level of abstraction by interacting with WASIM through its Python API. WASIM can be used to directly check formal properties on symbolic traces or to extract useful fragments from symbolic representations to construct safe inductive invariants as a correctness certificate. We demonstrate the utility of WASIM on the verification of two pipelined hardware designs. WASIM and the case studies is available under open-source license at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7247147.