Design and development of frameworks for CPU verification efficiency improvement

Abstract

Bug finding is a critical component of the verification flow and is resource intensive.In a typical week, a debug engineer writes triages, which take up significant amount of time that could be spent debugging another unique issue, and the lack of standardization in scripting causes maintainability issues in functional verification bug triage. A framework that allows customizable triage script generation is developed based on inputs from the engineer deploying YAML isn’t another markup language (YAML) files and practical extraction and report language (PERL) scripting, and this methodology is made automated and is standardized across projects to ensure maximum benefit going forward. The use of auto-triage in the project of functional verification bug triage has contributed to a 18% increase in triaged signatures on average, from 40% before its use to 58% after. A similar earlier project vs. current project comparison shows a 20% uplift. The triaged inputs that are parsed are currently being fed to a machine learning algorithm, which will help further improve the debug efficiency. As part of future work, the information from input YAML files can be used to analyze simulation failure attributes, hence improving the overall efficiency of debugging.