Digital controllers have several advantages with respect to their flexibility and designs simplicity. However, they are subject to problems that are not faced by analog controllers. In particular, these problems are related to the finite word-length
implementation that might lead to overflows, limit cycles, and time constraints in fixed-point processors. This paper proposes a new method to detect designs errors in digital controllers using a state-of-the art bounded model checker based on satisfiability modulo theories. The experiments with digital controllers for a ball and beam plant demonstrate that the proposed method can be very effective in finding errors in digital controllers than other existing approaches based on traditional simulations tools.
