{"title":"A coordinated reachability analysis method for modular verification of asynchronous designs","authors":"Hao Zheng","doi":"10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340165","url":null,"abstract":"Divide-and-conquer is essential to address state explosion in model checking. Traditionally, an over-approximate context is required when verifying each individual component in a system. This may cause state explosion for the intermediate results as well as inefficiency for abstraction refinement. This paper presents an opposite approach, a coordinated reachability analysis method, that constructs state space of each component from an under-approximate context gradually until a counter-example is found or a fix-point in state space is reached. This method has an additional advantage in that counter-examples, if there are any, can be found much earlier leading to faster verification. Furthermore, this modular verification framework does not require complex compositional reasoning rules. The experimental results indicate that this method is promising.","PeriodicalId":153879,"journal":{"name":"2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop","volume":"198 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123463691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Automated debugging with high level abstraction and refinement","authors":"Sean Safarpour, A. Veneris","doi":"10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340178","url":null,"abstract":"Design debugging is a manual and time consuming task which takes as much as 60% of the verification effort. To alleviate the debugging pain automated debuggers must tackle industrial problems by increasing their capacity and improving their performance. This work introduces an abstraction and refinement methodology for debugging that leverages the high level information inherent to RTL designs. Function abstraction uses the modular nature of designs to simplify the debugging problem. If required, refinement re-introduces the necessary circuitry back into the design in order to find all error locations. The abstraction and refinement process is applied throughout the design's hierarchy allowing for a divide and conquer methodology. The proposed technique is shown to reduce the memory requirement by as much as 27x and reduce the run-time by two orders of magnitude over a conventional debugger.","PeriodicalId":153879,"journal":{"name":"2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop","volume":"2005 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114128362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dynamic verification of Multicore Communication applications in MCAPI","authors":"Subodh Sharma, G. Gopalakrishnan, Eric Mercer","doi":"10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340169","url":null,"abstract":"We present a dynamic direct code verification tool called MCC (MCAPI Checker) for applications written in the newly proposed Multicore Communications API (MCAPI). MCAPI provides both message passing and threading constructs, making the concurrent programming involved in MCAPI application development a non-trivial challenge. MCC intercepts MCAPI calls issued by user applications. Then, using a verification scheduler, MCC orchestrates a dependency directed replay of all relevant thread interleavings. This paper presents the technical challenges in handling MCC's non-blocking constructs. This is the first dynamic model checker for MCAPI applications, and as such our work provides designers the opportunity to use a formal design tool in verifying MCAPI applications and evaluating MCAPI itself in the formative stages of MCAPI.","PeriodicalId":153879,"journal":{"name":"2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115392483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A versatile scheme for the validation, testing and debugging of High Speed Serial Interfaces","authors":"Yongquan Fan, Z. Zilic","doi":"10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340167","url":null,"abstract":"The High-Speed Serial Interface (HSSI) is a cornerstone of the modern communications. To achieve high data rates, sophisticated techniques such as equalization and pre-compensation have now become common in HSSIs. With the concurrent increasing of design complexity and decreasing of the timing budget, the post-silicon validation, debugging and testing of HSSIs are becoming critical. This paper presents a versatile scheme to accelerate the post-silicon validation. Using a novel jitter injection scheme and an FPGA-based Bit Error Rate Tester (BERT), we can validate and test HSSIs without the need of high-speed Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) instruments and Design-for-Test (DFT) features; this scheme also overcomes existing ATE instrument limitations. We can also utilize ATE to provide a more versatile scheme for HSSI validation, debugging and testing.","PeriodicalId":153879,"journal":{"name":"2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125051397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Design-for-debug for post-silicon validation: Can high-level descriptions help?","authors":"N. Nicolici, Ho Fai Ko","doi":"10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340159","url":null,"abstract":"Post-silicon validation is an essential step in the design flow, which is needed to demonstrate that the implemented circuit meets its intended behavior. Due to lack of in-system controllability and observability, design-for-debug hardware is employed to aid post-silicon validation. A number of solutions have been proposed to implement the design-for-debug hardware, as well as to analyze the debug data that is acquired. Although the design entry is done at the register-transfer level, the existing approaches to aid post-silicon validation rely primarily on the information extracted from the gate level circuit descriptions. We anticipate that, as the design complexity continues to grow, extracting and processing circuit information at this level will become increasingly difficult. In this paper, we briefly summarize the known art and discuss some possible directions of investigation that can utilize high-level circuit descriptions to augment the existing solutions.","PeriodicalId":153879,"journal":{"name":"2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122690620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"TG-PRO: A new model for SAT-based ATPG","authors":"Huan Chen, Joao Marques-Silva","doi":"10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340173","url":null,"abstract":"Automatic Test Pattern Generation (ATPG) represents one of the first practical applications of Boolean Satisfiability (SAT). Even though ATPG can in general be considered easy for current state of the art SAT solvers, it is also the case that specific faults can be difficult to detect or prove undetectable, namely for large industrial circuits. Recent work on SAT-based ATPG has been motivated by industrial designs with ever increasing size, for which more efficient ATPG tools are essential. Moreover, ATPG models and algorithms find application in a number of other settings, that further motivate the development of more efficient SAT-based ATPG solutions. Interestingly, despite the potential interest of more efficient ATPG approaches, the core SAT-based ATPG model has remained essentially unchanged since it was first proposed in the late 80s. This paper proposes a new model for SAT-based ATPG. The proposed model is fundamentally different from previous SAT-based ATPG models in that the number of used variables is significantly reduced. Experimental results, obtained on a wide range of publicly available benchmarks, demonstrate that the new model allows significant performance improvements over other well-established models.","PeriodicalId":153879,"journal":{"name":"2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131502593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fault table generation using Graphics Processing Units","authors":"Kanupriya Gulati, S. Khatri","doi":"10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340175","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we explore the implementation of fault table generation on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). A fault table is essential for fault diagnosis and fault detection in VLSI testing and debug. Generating a fault table requires extensive fault simulation, with no fault dropping, and is extremely expensive from a computational standpoint. Fault simulation is inherently parallelizable, and the large number of threads that a GPU can operate on in parallel can be employed to accelerate fault simulation, and thereby accelerate fault table generation. Our approach, called GFTABLE, employs a pattern parallel approach which utilizes both bit-parallelism and thread-level parallelism. Our implementation is a significantly modified version of FSIM, which is pattern parallel fault simulation approach for single core processors. Like FSIM, GFTABLE utilizes critical path tracing and the dominator concept to reduce runtime. Further modifications to FSIM allow us to maximally harness the GPU's huge memory bandwidth and high computational power. Our approach does not store the circuit (or any part of the circuit) on the GPU. Efficient parallel reduction operations are implemented in our implementation of GFTABLE. We compare our performance to FSIM*, which is FSIM modified to generate a fault table on a single core processor. Our experiments indicate that GFTABLE, implemented on a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 GPU card, can generate a fault table for 0.5 million test patterns on average 7.85x faster when compared with FSIM*. With the NVIDIA Tesla server, our approach would be potentially 34.82x faster.","PeriodicalId":153879,"journal":{"name":"2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114647983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"FLARE: A design environment for FLASH-based space applications","authors":"M. Caramia, S. Carlo, M. Fabiano, P. Prinetto","doi":"10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340180","url":null,"abstract":"Designing a mass-memory device (i.e., a solid-state recorder) is one of the typical issues of mission-critical space system applications. Flash-memories could be used for this goal: a huge number of parameters and trade-offs need to be explored. Flash-memories are nonvolatile, shock-resistant and power-economic, but in turn have different drawback: e.g., their cost is higher than normal hard disk and the number of erasure cycles is bounded. Moreover space environment presents various issues especially because of radiations: different and quite often contrasting dimensions need to be explored during the design of a flash-memory based solid-state recorder. No systematic approach has so far been proposed to consider them all as a whole: as a consequence a novel design environment currently under development is aimed at supporting the design of flash-based mass-memory device for space applications.","PeriodicalId":153879,"journal":{"name":"2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop","volume":"418 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115934270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"IFRA: Post-silicon bug localization in processors","authors":"Sung-Boem Park, S. Mitra","doi":"10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340160","url":null,"abstract":"IFRA overcomes challenges associated with an expensive step in post-silicon validation of processors - pinpointing the bug location and the instruction sequence that exposes the bug from a system failure. On-chip recorders collect instruction footprints (information about flows of instructions, and what the instructions did as they passed through various design blocks) during the normal operation of the processor in a post-silicon system validation setup. Upon system failure, the recorded information is scanned out and analyzed off-line for bug localization. Special self-consistency-based program analysis techniques, together with the test program binary of the application executed during post-silicon validation, are used. Major benefits of using IFRA over traditional techniques for post-silicon bug localization are: 1. It does not require full system-level reproduction of bugs, and, 2. It does not require full system-level simulation. Simulation results on a complex super-scalar processor demonstrate that IFRA is effective in accurately localizing electrical bugs with very little impact on overall chip area.","PeriodicalId":153879,"journal":{"name":"2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop","volume":"291 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120907259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Localizing transient faults using dynamic bayesian networks","authors":"Susmit Jha, Wenchao Li, S. Seshia","doi":"10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/HLDVT.2009.5340170","url":null,"abstract":"Transient faults are a major concern in today's deep sub-micron semiconductor technology. These faults are rare but they have been known to cause catastrophic system-level failures. Transient errors often occur due to physical effects on deployed systems and hence, diagnosis of transient errors must be performed over manufactured chips or systems assembled from black-box components where arbitrary instrumentation of the system is not possible and hence, the system state is only partially observable. Further, these systems are often composed of components that are third party IP which further adds opaqueness to the system. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach to localize transient faults in space and time for such partially observable systems. From a set of correct traces and a failure trace, we seek to locate the faulty component and the cycle of operation at which the fault occurred. Our technique uses correct system traces over monitored components of the system to learn a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) summarizing the temporal dependencies across the monitored components. This DBN is augmented with different error hypotheses allowed by the fault model. The most probable explanation (MPE) among these hypotheses corresponds to the most likely location of the error. We evaluated the effectiveness of our technique on a set of ISCAS89 benchmarks and a router design used in on-chip networks in a multi-core design.","PeriodicalId":153879,"journal":{"name":"2009 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop","volume":"38 4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131459969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}