Debugging strategies for mere mortals

Recent improvements in design verification strive to automate error detection and greatly enhance engineers´ ability to detect functional errors. However, the process of diagnosing the cause of these errors, and subsequently fixing them, remains one of the most difficult tasks of verification. The complexity of design descriptions, paired with the scarcity of software tools supporting this task lead to an activity that is mostly ad-hoc, labor intensive and accessible only to a few debugging specialists within a design house. This paper discusses some recent research solutions that support the debugging effort by simplifying and automating bug diagnosis. These novel techniques demonstrate that, through the support of structured methodologies, debugging can become a task pursued by the average design engineer. We also outline some of the upcoming trends in design verification, postponing some the verification effort to runtime, and discuss how debugging could leverage these trends to achieve better quality of results.