IEEE.1 An Industrial Strength Theorem Prover for a Logic Based on Common Lisp

Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the Abstract—ACL2 is a re-implemented extended version of Boyer and Moore’s Nqthm and Kaufmann’s Pc-Nqthm, intended for large scale verification projects. This paper deals primarily with how we scaled up Nqthm’s logic to an “industrial strength ” programming language — namely, a large applicative subset of Common Lisp — while preserving the use of total functions within the logic. This makes it possible to run formal models efficiently while keeping the logic simple. We enumerate many other important features of ACL2 and we briefly summarize two industrial applications: a model of the Motorola CAP digital signal processing chip and the proof of the correctness of the kernel of the floating point division algorithm on the AMD5K86 microprocessor by Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Index terms—formal verification, automatic theorem proving, computational logic, partial functions, total functions, type checking, microcode verification, floating point division, digital signal processing 1