Alan Hu

Dr. Alan Hu’s main research interest is developing and applying automated formal verification techniques as a practical debugging tool for designing protocols, computer systems, software, and VLSI chips. As the marketplace demands more features and higher performance delivered in shorter development times, traditional debugging and validation techniques are not keeping pace. Currently, large chip design projects spend more resources on validation than on design, and major projects in the future will likely require 2-3 validation engineers for each design engineer. Clearly, additional tools are needed to help debug designs.

Formal verification can help meet this need; especially promising are the new generation of automatic verification techniques. Dr. Hu’s motivation is explicitly economic—find bugs faster and cheaper—rather than the more traditional use of formal verification to certify correctness. As a consequence, his research favors automation over mathematical expressiveness to minimize the labor invested in formal verification.

Co-Principal Investigator Awards