High-level design error diagnosis using backtrace on decision diagrams

The paper proposes a method for locating design errors at the source-level of hardware description language code using the design representation of High-Level Decision Diagram (HLDD) models. The method is based on backtracing the mismatched and matched outputs of the system under verification on HLDDs. Experiments on a set of sequential register-transfer level benchmarks show that the method is capable of locating the design errors injected with a high accuracy and a short run time. In fact all the errors injected in the experiments were identified as top suspects by the proposed diagnosis algorithm.