Increasing the accuracy of SAT-based debugging

Equivalence checking and property checking are powerful techniques to detect error traces. Debugging these traces is a time consuming design task where automation provides help. In particular, debugging based on Boolean satisfiability (SAT) has been shown to be quite efficient. Given some error traces, the algorithm returns fault candidates. But using random error traces cannot ensure that a fault candidate is sufficient to explain all erroneous behaviors. Our approach provides a more accurate diagnosis by iterating the generation of counterexamples and debugging. This increases the accuracy of the debugging result and yields more valuable counterexamples. As a consequence less time consuming manual iterations between verification and debugging are required - thus the debugging productivity increases.