Towards Mechanical Verification of Parts of the IEEE P1394 Serial Bus

Lars Kühne and Jozef Hooman and Willem-Paul de Roever

May 1997

Appeared in: Proceedings 2nd International Workshop on Applied Formal Methods in System Design, Zagreb, pages 73-85, 1997.

ABSTRACT

The IEEE P1394 Serial Bus standard provides high performance connections for data transfer between hardware components and is especially well suited for connecting multimedia devices. To achieve its mechanical verification, a high level specification is developed for the asynchronous part of the P1394 Link layer, using the verification tool PVS. We derive a formal framework which closely resembles the state machine approach used in the standard document. In this framework, a new parallel combinator characterizes synchronous message passing between transitions for which a set of messages is exchanged atomically. The combinator is mechanically checked for being commutative and associative. As expected, unclarities, ambiguities and unforseen properties need to be resolved in the specification of the Link layer. To date, important Link Layer properties have been handproved using linear time temporal logic; the next aim of the authors is the mechanization of these proofs in PVS.

Postscript