FMCAD 2013 is the thirteenth in a series of conferences on the theory and applications of formal methods in hardware and system verification. FMCAD provides a leading forum to researchers in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for reasoning formally about computing systems. FMCAD covers formal aspects of computer-aided system design including verification, specification, synthesis, and testing.

FMCAD was first held in 1996, and was a bi-annual conference until 2006, when the FMCAD and CHARME conferences merged into a single, annual conference. Before merging, FMCAD was held in the United States on even years and its sister conference, CHARME, was held in Europe on odd years. Since 2006, the FMCAD conference has been held annually at various international venues.

FMCAD 2013 will be co-located with MEMOCODE, the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for Codesign, DIFTS, International Workshop on Design and Implementation of Formal Tools and Systems, and HWMCC'13, Hardware Model Checking Competition, in Portland, OR. MEMOCODE will take place from October 18 to 19, followed by a joint FMCAD/MEMOCODE tutorial day on October 20. DIFTS will take place on October 19, 2013. FMCAD will continue from October 21 to 23, 2013.

Best Paper Award

The FMCAD 2013 Best Paper Award was awarded to the paper "An SMT Based Method for Optimizing Arithmetic Computations in Embedded Software Code" by Hassan Eldib and Chao Wang.

The paper tackles a very interesting problem, namely the optimization of control software manipulating fixed-point integer data, and presents an innovative and scalable solution based on the use of SMT solvers and inductive synthesis procedures. The presented procedure produces optimized code that can potentially be run on a cheaper processor with smaller bit width or that safely can be applied to a larger range of values on a given architecture.

The paper is very well written and has received strong support in review process.

Congratulations for an important step towards the design of better embedded software!

The best paper award was decided by the Best Paper Committee consisting of Per Bjesse, Alessandro Cimatti, and Keijo Heljanko.