Book excerpt: Improve design efficiency and reduce costs with this practical guide to formal and simulation-based functional verification. Giving you a theoretical and practical understanding of the key issues involved, expert authors including Wayne Wolf and Dan Gajski explain both formal techniques (model checking, equivalence checking) and simulation-based techniques (coverage metrics, test generation). You get insights into practical issues including hardware verification languages (HVLs) and system-level debugging. The foundations of formal and simulation-based techniques are covered too, as are more recent research advances including transaction-level modeling and assertion-based verification, plus the theoretical underpinnings of verification, including the use of decision diagrams and Boolean satisfiability (SAT).