By using high-level synthesis tools, electronic system level design provides a promising solution to fill the growing design productivity gap of high quality hardware systems. However, an error may exist in the implementation of a compiler due to the complex and error prone compiling process. Equivalence checking is the process of proving that the target code is a correct translation of the source code being compiled. In this paper, we present a novel approach to solve the false-negative

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... of value propagation (VP) based equivalence checking method. Finite State Machine with Datapath (FSMD) is used to model the original and the transformed programs. Our method proves the equivalence by comparing the deep state sequences (DSS) between the original and the transformed FSMD. Automatic test vector generation (ATVG) and simulation technique are used to recognize the corresponding DSS and exclude the false paths to solve the false-negative problem. The promising experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method to solve the false-negative problem in VP based equivalence checking method. INDEX TERMS Equivalence checking, high-level synthesis, deep state sequence, FSMD.