Abstract. We present a new decision procedure for finite-precision bitvector arithmetic with arbitrary bit-vector operations. Our procedure alternates between generating under-and over-approximations of the original bit-vector formula. An under-approximation is obtained by a translation to propositional logic in which some bit-vector variables are encoded with fewer Boolean variables than their width. If the underapproximation is unsatisfiable, we use the unsatisfiable core to derive an over-approximation based on the subset of predicates that participated in the proof of unsatisfiability. If this over-approximation is satisfiable, the satisfying assignment guides the refinement of the previous underapproximation by increasing, for some bit-vector variables, the number of Boolean variables that encode them. We present experimental results that suggest that this abstraction-based approach can be considerably more efficient than directly invoking the SAT solver on the original formula as well as other competing decision procedures.
al recently proposed abstraction based decision procedures for bit-vector arithmetic REF .
Deciding bit-vector arithmetic with abstraction
IN PROC. TACAS 2007
Computer Science