Coquet: a Coq library for verifying hardware

TL;DR

Coquet is a Coq library that simplifies modeling and verifying hardware circuits, enabling formal proofs of circuit correctness through a deep-embedding approach and specialized tactics.

Contribution

It introduces a new Coq library with a deep-embedding and tactics for hardware circuit verification, demonstrated on various circuit examples.

Findings

Successfully verified a parametric adder

Proved correctness of higher-order circuit combinators

Verified sequential circuits like buffers and registers

Abstract

We propose a new library to model and verify hardware circuits in the Coq proof assistant. This library allows one to easily build circuits by following the usual pen-and-paper diagrams. We define a deep-embedding: we use a (dependently typed) data-type that models the architecture of circuits, and a meaning function. We propose tactics that ease the reasoning about the behavior of the circuits, and we demonstrate that our approach is practicable by proving the correctness of various circuits: a text-book divide and conquer adder of parametric size, some higher-order combinators of circuits, and some sequential circuits: a buffer, and a register.