Department of Computer Science
CPSC 513: Integrated System Design

Meets: MW 2:00-3:30pm, ICCS 304

First meeting is Monday, September 10! (in accordance with deparmental tradition).

Instructor: Alan Hu, CICSR 325, A J H at C S dot U B C dot C A

Links to Calendar, Readings, Assignments:

Class Calendar

Reading List

Assignments

Overview:

Course Objectives: Students completing the course will gain a solid foundation in current, practical formal verification techniques, the underlying theory, and significant experience applying these techniques to a real problem of the student's choosing. The course provides necessary background for advanced research in the field, as well as general exposure to this area for students pursuing research in other areas.

Warning: The course name "Integrated System Design" is a misnomer. The course will actually be about automatic formal verification of computer systems, be they hardware, software, or some combination. I used to feel a little guilty about shifting the course towards my research area (hence this warning), but as I travel, everyone (including people from cool places like Microsoft, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, the major EDA companies, and several start-ups) is begging me for more verification students, and my grad students have landed great jobs. So, I don't feel guilty anymore. :-)

Textbook:

There is no textbook for the course. Readings will come from the original research papers.

Prerequisites:

Graduate standing in CS or ECE, or consent of instructor. This area is a wonderful blend of theory, hardware, and software, but as a result, people's backgrounds will vary. I intend to make the course fairly self-contained, but familiarity with automata theory, mathematical logic, basic digital logic, differential equations, and some computer architecture will be helpful.

Historical Links:

The previous website for my old version of 513 has a wealth of links and papers, so I'm perserving a link here. Many of the sub-links may be broken, though. I'll also be merging in material from Ian Mitchell's version of 513 from 2005.