Model checking methods are used to verify the correctness of digital circuits and code against their formal specification. In case of design or programming errors, they provide counterexample evidence of erroneous behavior. Model checking techniques suffer from inherent high complexity. New model checking methods attempt to speed it up and reduce the memory requirement. Recently, the more ambitious task of converting the formal specification automatically into correct-by-design code has gained significant progress. In this paper, automata-based techniques for model checking and automatic synthesis are described.