Debugging at the Electronic System Level

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Frank Rogin, Rolf Drechsler

   Pages 1-8

3. ESL Design and Verification

   • Frank Rogin, Rolf Drechsler

   Pages 9-31

4. Early Error Detection

   • Frank Rogin, Rolf Drechsler

   Pages 33-69

5. High-Level Debugging and Exploration

   • Frank Rogin, Rolf Drechsler

   Pages 71-104

6. Learning about the Design

   • Frank Rogin, Rolf Drechsler

   Pages 105-141

7. Isolating Failure Causes

   • Frank Rogin, Rolf Drechsler

   Pages 143-163

8. Summary and Conclusion

   • Frank Rogin, Rolf Drechsler

   Pages 165-168

9. Back Matter

   Pages 169-199

   PDF

Debugging becomes more and more the bottleneck to chip design productivity, especially while developing modern complex integrated circuits and systems at the Electronic System Level (ESL). Today, debugging is still an unsystematic and lengthy process. Here, a simple reporting of a failure is not enough, anymore. Rather, it becomes more and more important not only to find many errors early during development but also to provide efficient methods for their isolation. In Debugging at the Electronic System Level the state-of-the-art of modeling and verification of ESL designs is reviewed. There, a particular focus is taken onto SystemC. Then, a reasoning hierarchy is introduced. The hierarchy combines well-known debugging techniques with whole new techniques to improve the verification efficiency at ESL. The proposed systematic debugging approach is supported amongst others by static code analysis, debug patterns, dynamic program slicing, design visualization, property generation, and automatic failure isolation. All techniques were empirically evaluated using real-world industrial designs. Summarized, the introduced approach enables a systematic search for errors in ESL designs. Here, the debugging techniques improve and accelerate error detection, observation, and isolation as well as design understanding.

• ESL Debugging
• Electronic System Level (ESL)
• SystemC
• debugging techniques
• design automation
• electronic design automation
• integrated circuit

• Integrierte Schaltungen, Institutsteil Entwurfsautomatisierung, Fraunhofer -Institut fur, Dresden, Germany

  Frank Rogin

• AG Rechnerarchitektur, Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany

  Rolf Drechsler

Policies and ethics