High-level Modelling, Analysis, and Verification on FPGA-based Hardware Design

Implementation of network components in hardware is a trend in advancedhigh-speed network technologies. Incoming packets can be analysed infast programmable cards using FPGA. Designing such a system is not easyand requires a detailed analysis. In this paper, we discuss analysisand verification of a non-trivial system-the network monitor andanalyser Scampi that has been developed within the Liberouter project.The Scampi analyser is implemented in FPGA on a special add-on card. Itanalyses packets incoming with the speed of several Gbps. We created anabstract model of the design and verified several safety properties.Our main task was to check if there is a risk of
buffer overflow and how to set the length of buffers to prevent
this. First, we made a timed analysis by hand and then we usedautomated tools - model-checkers Uppaal and TReX. In the followingtext, we show how to model such a complex system and some results ofour analysis and verification. We also propose a framework formodelling and analysis of systems where the throughput of requests,their speed, and the length of buffers are important. The proposedmodels can be reused when verifying and analysing of systems of thegiven kind.