If you are a newcomer to the SATisfiability problem, you might want to take a look at wikipedia's page on the boolean satisfiability problem first. You might also find those surveys of interest. For a deeper insight of the current interest on SAT solvers for software and hardware verification, Armin Biere's course on formal systems is a good start. Eugene Goldberg has also a nice and somehow non standard way of introducing modern SAT solvers in his three part course on SAT.
R. Sebastiani, P. Giorgini, and J. Mylopoulos. 16th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, volume 3084 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, page 20-35. Riga, Latvia, (June 2004)
F. Krzakala, J. Kurchan, and L. Zdeborova. Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)