Other

Altera Corporation

Sean Safarpour

Gregg William Baeckler

Jinyong Yuan

Andreas Veneris

A plurality of diagnosis methods are provided for enabling hardware debugging. A first diagnosis method enables hardware debugging by means of time abstraction. A second-diagnosis method enables hardware debugging by means of abstraction and refinement. A third diagnosis method enables hardware debugging by means of QBF-formulation for replicated functions. A fourth diagnosis method enables hardware debugging by means of a max-sat debugging formulation. A system and computer program for implementing the diagnosis methods is also provide.

Method, system and computer program for hardware design debugging

A plurality of diagnosis methods are provided for enabling hardware debugging. A first diagnosis method enables hardware debugging by means of time abstraction. A second diagnosis method enables hardware debugging by means of abstraction and refinement. A third diagnosis method enables hardware debugging by means of QBF-formulation for replicated functions. A fourth diagnosis method enables hardware debugging by means of a max-sat debugging formulation. A system and computer program for implementing the diagnosis methods is also provide.

Valid implementations of functions with programmable logic blocks are efficiently determined by creating an approximation of a hardware configuration of programmable logic blocks to quickly screen out configurations unlikely to provide a valid results. If a configuration passes this first phase, the approximation is refined to search for valid function implementations with the hardware configuration. The approximation and refinement may use a partitioning of function input variables to logic blocks to reduce the search space. Additional conflict clauses may be used to further reduce the search space. Implementations of sample functions or other previously considered functions may be analyzed to identify conflict clauses that are reusable for analyzing other functions. A representation of potential implementations of a function can be subdivided into subsets and analyzed separately. The intersection of the solutions from each subset are valid implementations of the function.

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Toronto, Canada

Sean Safarpour