Title
Accurate Rank Ordering of Error Candidates for Efficient HDL Design Debugging
Abstract
When hardware description languages (HDLs) are used in describing the behavior of a digital circuit, design errors (or bugs) almost inevitably appear in the HDL code of the circuit. Existing approaches attempt to reduce efforts involved in this debugging process by extracting a reduced set of error candidates. However, the derived set can still contain many error candidates, and finding true design errors among the candidates in the set may still consume much valuable time. A debugging priority method was proposed to speed up the error-searching process in the derived error candidate set. The idea is to display error candidates in an order that corresponds to an individual's degree of suspicion. With this method, error candidates are placed in a rank order based on their probability of being an error. The more likely an error candidate is a design error (or a bug), the higher the rank order that it has. With the displayed rank order, circuit designers should find design errors quicker than with blind searching when searching for design errors among all the derived candidates. However, the currently used confidence score (CS) for deriving the debugging priority has some flaws in estimating the likelihood of correctness of error candidates due to the masking error situation. This reduces the degree of accuracy in establishing a debugging priority . Therefore, the objective of this work is to develop a new probabilistic confidence score (PCS) that takes the masking error situation into consideration in order to provide a more reliable and accurate debugging priority. The experimental results show that our proposed PCS achieves better results in estimating the likelihood of correctness and can indeed suggest a debugging priority with better accuracy, as compared to the CS.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/TCAD.2008.2009163
IEEE Trans. on CAD of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Error diagnosis,HDL code debugging,rank ordering,HDL design debugging,hardware description languages,debugging priority,accurate debugging priority,true design error,verification,masking error situation,masking error,accurate rank,rank order,debugging priority method,VLSI,integrated circuit design,design error,hardware description language (HDL),error candidates,probabilistic confidence score,error candidate,debugging process,error candidate set,error statistics,efficient hdl design debugging,circuit design
Journal
28
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
0278-0070
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.39
21
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tai-Ying Jiang1102.01
Chien-Nan Jimmy Liu29727.07
Jing-Yang Jou368188.55