Automated Source-Level Error Localization in Hardware Designs

摘要

DETECTING, LOCALIZING, AND FIXING faults are crucial for an error-prone development process. In general, detecting and repairing misbehavior in an early stage of the development cycle considerably reduces costs and development time. In hardware design, shrinking design windows, increasing design complexity, and expensive prototyping are pushing companies toward considerable efforts in design analysis, verification, and debugging at the source code level. Production use of a source-code-based methodology lets designers create very complex systems on chips, thereby employing the source code as the basis for logic synthesis. Usually, developers detect faults in hardware designs with verification tools--for example, model checkers--or by using test cases together with simulators and waveform trace tools. In both cases, the hardware designer identifies test vectors leading to the unexpected results.