Invited Talk: Pros and Cons of Assertion Mining

Assertion mining flips the way verification works by extracting formal properties from the actual implementation of the target design and searching for inconsistencies with respect to the initial specification. While this removes the burden of time-consuming and error-prone manual definition, are the mined properties actually useful? After reviewing the state of the art concerning existing approaches and tools, this talk questions the pros and cons of assertion mining and describes how mined assertions can be exploited as an effective coverage metrics for functional verification.