A succinct memory model for automated design debugging

Abstract

Abstract-In today's complex SoC designs, verification and debugging are becoming ever more crucial and increasingly timeconsuming tasks. The prevalence of embedded memories adds to the difficulty of the problem by exponentially increasing the statespace of the design. In this work, a novel memory model for design debugging is presented. It models memory succinctly by avoiding an explicit representation for each memory bit. The method uses the simulation of the erroneous design to guide the debugging process. This results in a parameterizable formal encoding that grows linearly with the erroneous trace length, significantly reducing the memory requirements of the debugging problem. In addition, the proposed model is extended to handle an arbitrary initial memory configuration, as well as non-cycle accurate output traces where only a final expected memory state is available for comparison. Experiments on industrial designs show a 96% average reduction in memory usage along with a noticeable performance improvement compared to previous work.