VeryBug: An Attention-based Framework for Bug Localization in Hardware Designs

In recent years, there has been an exponential growth in the size and complexity of System-on-Chip (SoC) designs targeting different specialized applications. The cost of an undetected bug in these systems is much higher than in traditional processors, as it may imply loss of property or life. Despite decades of research on simulation and formal methods for debugging and verification, the problem is exacerbated by the ever-shrinking time-to-market and ever-increasing demand to churn out billions of devices. In this work, we propose VeriBug, which leverages recent advances in deep learning (DL) to accelerate debugging at the Register-Transfer level (RTL) and generates explanations of likely root causes. Our experiments show that VeriBug can achieve an average bug localization coverage of 82.5% on open-source designs and a wide variety of injected bugs.