Source Code Error Detection in High-Level Synthesis Functional Verification

Abstract

A dynamic functional verification method that compares untimed simulations versus timed simulations for synthesizable [high-level synthesis (HLS)] behavioral descriptions (ANSI-C) is presented in this paper. This paper proposes a method that automatically inserts a set of probes into the untimed behavioral description. These probes record the status of internal signals of the behavioral description during an initial untimed simulation. These simulation results are subsequently used as golden outputs for the verification of the internal signals during a timed simulation once the behavioral description has been synthesized using HLS. Our proposed method reports any simulation mismatches and accurately pinpoints any discrepancies between the functional Software (SW) simulation and the timed simulation at the original behavioral description (source code). Our method does not only determine where to place the probes, but is also able to insert different type of probes based on the specified HLS synthesis options in order not to interfere with the HLS process, minimizing the total number of probes and the size of the data to be stored in the trace file in order to minimize the running time. Results show that our proposed method is very effective and extremely simple to use as it is fully automated. Index Terms-Error detection latency (EDL), functional verification, high-level synthesis (HLS).