FMCAD 2008 is the eighth in a series of conferences on the theory and application of formal methods in hardware and system design and verification. In 2005, the bi-annual FMCAD and sister conference CHARME decided to merge to form an annual conference with a unified community. The resulting unified FMCAD provides a leading international forum to researchers and practitioners in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for formally reasoning about computing systems, as well as open challenges therein.

Topics of interest for the technical program include, but are not limited to:

• Foundations: advancing industrial-strength technologies in model checking, theorem proving, equivalence checking, abstraction and refinement techniques, property-preserving reduction techniques, compositional methods, decision procedures, SAT- and BDD-based methods, combining deductive methods with decision procedures, and probabilistic methods.

• Verification applications: tools, industrial experience reports, and case studies. We encourage the submission of materials relating to novel and challenging industrial-scale applications of formal methods, including problem domains where formal methods worked well or even fell short. We also encourage submissions relating to the development and execution of methodologies for formal and informal verification strategies.

• Applications of formal methods in design: topics relating to the application and applicability of assertion-based verification, equivalence checking, transaction-level verification, semi-formal verification, runtime verification, simulation and testcase generation, coverage analysis, microcode verification, embedded systems, software verification, concurrent systems, timing verification, and formal approaches to performance and power.

• Model-based approaches: modeling and specification languages, system-level design and verification, design derivation and transformation, and correct-by-construction methods.

• Formal methods for the design and verification of emerging and novel technologies: nano, quantum, biological, video, gaming, and multimedia applications.

Submissions must be made electronically in PDF format through the FMCAD'08 web site http://fmcad.org/2008.

The proceedings will be published by ACM and will be available online in the ACM Digital Library and the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Two categories of papers can be submitted: regular papers (8 pages), containing original research that has not been previously published, nor concurrently submitted for publication; and short papers (4 pages), describing applications, case studies, industrial experience reports, emerging results, or implemented tools with novel features. Regular and short papers must use the IEEE Transactions format on letter-size paper with a 10-point font size (see http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/pubs/transactions/stylesheets.html). We recommend that self-citations be written in the third person, though authors will be required to identify themselves on their submissions. Submissions must contain original research that has not been previously published, nor concurrently submitted for publication. Any partial overlap with any published or concurrently submitted paper must be clearly indicated. If experimental results are reported, authors are strongly encouraged to provide adequate access to their data so that results can be independently verified.

A small number of accepted papers will be considered for a distinguished paper award.

• Mark Aagaard, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Jason Baumgartner, IBM Corporation, USA
• Valeria Bertacco, University of Michigan, USA
• Armin Biere, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
• Per Bjesse, Synopsys, USA
• Roderick Bloem, TU Graz, Austria
• Dominique Borrione, Grenoble University, France
• Gianpiero Cabodi, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
• Alessandro Cimatti (co-chair), FBK-irst, Trento, Italy
• Koen Claessen, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
• Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, University of Utah, USA
• Aarti Gupta, NEC Laboratories America, USA
• Alan J. Hu, University of British Columbia, Canada
• Robert Jones (co-chair), Intel Corp., USA
• Daniel Kroening, Oxford University, UK
• Andreas Kuehlmann, Cadence Laboratories, USA
• Wolfgang Kunz, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
• Shuvendu Lahiri, Microsoft, USA
• Jeremy Levitt, Mentor Graphics, USA
• Panagiotis Manolios, Northeastern University, USA
• Andy Martin, IBM Research Division, USA
• Tom Melham, Oxford University, UK
• Ken McMillan, Cadence Labs, USA
• John O'Leary, Intel Corp., USA
• Lee Pike, Galois Inc., USA
• Rajeev Ranjan, Jasper Design Automation, USA
• Sandip Ray, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Alper Sen, Freescale Austin, USA
• Natasha Sharygina, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Eli Singerman, Intel Corp., Israel
• Fei Xie, Portland State U., USA
• Karen Yorav, IBM Haifa Research Laboratory, Israel