Automated Verification Code Generation in HLS Using Software Execution Traces (Abstract Only)

Abstract

Improved quality of results from high level synthesis (HLS) tools has led to their increased adoption. Despite the automated translation from high level descriptions to register-transfer level (RTL) implementations, functional verification remains a major challenge. Verification can take significantly more time than the design process; if there is a functional mismatch, developers must back-trace thousands of signals and cycles to determine underlying cause. The challenge is further exacerbated with HLS-produced RTL, which is often not human readable. To overcome these challenges, we present a verification technique that uses software-execution traces and automated insertion of verification code into the HLS-generated RTL to assist in debugging. The verification code helps pinpoint the earliest instance of RTL simulation mismatch, either caused by HLS engine bugs or design bugs, and related instructions. We also integrate a watchdog timer to examine the execution of control-flow and perform source-to-source transformation on benchmarks to take advantage of our proposed instrumentation. We also create a framework to insert various types of bugs, e.g. data-flow, control-flow and operational bugs, to evaluate our technique. We use the CHStone benchmark suite and demonstrate that our verification detects over 90% of the inserted bugs, with over 70% of them detected within 10 cycles. In addition, the proposed flow can detect real-life bugs existing in previously released versions of CHStone suite as well.