SAT-based Automated Design Debugging: Improvements and Application to Low-power Design

With the growing complexity of modern VLSI designs, design errors become increasingly common. Design debugging today emerges as a bottleneck in the design flow, consuming up to 30% of the overall design effort. Unfortunately, design debugging is still a predominantly manual process in the industry. To tackle this problem, we enhance existing automated debugging tools and extend their applications to different design domains. The first contribution improves the performance of automated design debugging tools by using structural circuit properties, namely dominance relationships and non-solution implications. Overall, a 42% average reduction in solving run-time demonstrates the efficacy of this approach. The second contribution presents an automated debugging methodology for clock-gating design. Using clock-gating properties, we optimize existing debugging techniques to localizes and rectifies the design errors introduced by clock-gating implementations. Experiments show a 6% average reduction in debugging time and 80% of the power-savings retained.MAS