Debugging is one of the major bottlenecks in the current VLSI design process as design size and complexity increase. Efficient automation of debugging procedures helps to reduce debugging time and to increase diagnosis accuracy. This work proposes an approach for automating the design debugging procedures by integrating SAT-based debugging with testbenchbased verification. The diagnosis accuracy increases by iterating debugging and counterexample generation, i.e., the total number of fault candidates decreases. The experimental results show that our approach is as accurate as exact formal debugging in 71% of the experiments.

Abstract-Due to the increasing design size and complexity of modern Integrated Circuits (IC) and the decreasing time-tomarket, debugging is one of the major bottlenecks in the IC development cycle. This paper presents a generalized approach to automate debugging which can be used in different scenarios from design debugging to post-silicon debugging. The approach is based on model-based diagnosis. Diagnostic traces are proposed as an enhancement reducing debugging time and increasing diagnosis accuracy. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the approach in post-silicon debugging.