Accurate Rank Ordering of Error Candidates for Efficient HDL Design Debugging
Accurate Rank Ordering of Error Candidates for Efficient HDL Design Debugging
复制标题
错误候选的准确排序以实现高效 HDL 设计调试
DOI：
10.1109/tcad.2008.2009163
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发表时间：
2009
影响因子：
2.9
通讯作者：
Jing
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
T. Jiang;C. Liu;Jing
当使用硬件描述语言（HDL）描述数字电路的行为时，电路的HDL代码中几乎不可避免地会出现设计错误（或错误）。现有的方法试图通过提取一组减少的候选错误来减少调试过程中的工作量。然而，衍生集仍然可能包含许多候选错误，并且在集合中的候选错误中找到真正的设计错误仍然可能消耗大量宝贵的时间。提出了一种调试优先级的方法，以加快错误候选集的搜索速度。这个想法是按照与个人怀疑程度相对应的顺序显示错误候选项。使用这种方法，根据错误的可能性对候选错误进行排序。一个候选错误越有可能是设计错误（或bug），它的等级顺序就越高。利用显示的阶序，电路设计者在所有衍生候选电路中查找设计错误时，可以比盲目搜索更快地找到设计错误。然而，目前用于确定调试优先级的置信分数（CS）由于屏蔽错误的情况，在估计候选错误的正确性可能性方面存在一些缺陷。这降低了建立调试优先级的准确性。因此，本文的目标是开发一种考虑屏蔽错误情况的新的概率置信度评分（PCS），以提供更可靠和准确的调试优先级。实验结果表明，与CS相比，我们提出的PCS在估计正确性可能性方面取得了更好的结果，并且确实可以提出具有更高精度的调试优先级。
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.