EvoDeb: Debugging Evolving Hardware Designs

Increasing design complexity, skyrocketing fabrication costs for modern digital systems coupled with an unacceptably large number of silicon respins led to growing importance of comprehensive and automated design verification. Akin to software configuration management, it is becoming commonplace to maintain large hardware design code-bases with hardware configuration management tools. A missing piece of crucial technology in this approach is to manage design verification across evolving hardware designs. In this paper, we propose an efficient methodology for automatically localizing design errors across design versions. The proposed technique, Evo Deb, can be easily integrated into a hardware configuration management framework and is scalable for large designs. We demonstrate the efficacy of Evo Deb on a couple of bugs on open-source hardware designs across multiple evolving variants.