Automatic TLM Fault Localization for SystemC

To meet today´s time-to-market demands, catching bugs as early as possible during the design of a system is essential. In electronic system level design where SystemC has become the de-facto standard due to transaction level modeling (TLM), many approaches for verification have been developed. They determine an error trace that demonstrates the difference between the required and the actual behavior of the system. However, the subsequent debugging process is very time-consuming, in particular due to TLM-related faults caused by complex process synchronization and concurrency. In this paper, we present an automatic fault localization approach for SystemC TLM designs. We target typical TLM faults, such as accidentally swapped blocking and nonblocking transactions, erroneous event notification, or incorrect transaction data. The approach determines parts of the design that can be changed such that the intended behavior of the design is obtained by removing the contradiction given by the error trace. Single, as well as multiple faults, is considered. Techniques based on bounded model checking are used to find the faulty parts. We demonstrate the quality of our approach by several experiments. As shown in the experiments, the fault locations are identified very fast and hence a significant acceleration for the design of SystemC TLM models is achieved.