Automating post-silicon debugging and repair
Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
The day Sherlock Holmes decided to do EDA
Proceedings of the 46th Annual Design Automation Conference
Debugging strategies for mere mortals
Proceedings of the 46th Annual Design Automation Conference
Post-silicon debugging for multi-core designs
Proceedings of the 2010 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
nuTAB-BackSpace: rewriting to normalize non-determinism in post-silicon debug traces
CAV'12 Proceedings of the 24th international conference on Computer Aided Verification
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Finding the cause of a bug can be one of the most time-consuming activities in design verification. This is particularly true in the case of bugs discovered in the context of a random-simulation-based methodology, where bug traces, or counterexamples, may be several hundred thousand cycles long. In this paper, BUg TRAce MINimization (Butramin), which is a bug trace minimizer, is proposed. Butramin considers a bug trace produced by a random simulator or semiformal verification software and produces an equivalent trace of shorter length. Butramin applies a range of minimization techniques, deploying both simulation-based and formal methods, with the objective of producing highly reduced traces that still expose the original bug. Butramin was evaluated on a range of designs, including the publicly available picoJava microprocessor, and bug traces up to one million cycles long. Experiments show that in most cases, Butramin is able to reduce traces to a very small fraction of their initial sizes, in terms of cycle length and signals involved. The minimized traces can greatly facilitate bug analysis and reduce regression runtime