Abstraction and Refinement Techniques in Automated Design Debugging

Verification is a major bottleneck in the VLSI design flow with the tasks of error detection, error localization, and error correction consuming up to 70% of the overall design effort. This work proposes a departure from conventional debugging techniques by introducing abstraction and refinement during error localization. Under this new framework, existing debugging techniques can handle large designs with long counter-examples yet remain run time and memory efficient. Experiments on benchmark and industrial designs confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework and encourage further development of abstraction and refinement methodologies for existing debugging techniques.