Abstraction as a Practical Debugging Tool

S. Ray

In M. S. Abadir, L. Wang, and J. Bhadra, editors, Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Microprocessor Test and Verification, Common Challenges and Solutions (MTV 2008), Austin, TX, December 2008, pages 45-48. IEEE Computer Society

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Abstract

We present a procedure for automatically constructing an abstract state model of a hardware design using the definition of the state transition function for the design and a description of the set of observations to be preserved in the abstraction. The procedure iteratively constructs the abstract model by refining a mapping from the states of the original design to the states of the abstraction. The resulting abstraction is guaranteed to be a conservative approximation of the design. We discuss our implementation of the procedure and different design trade-offs involved in making it effective.

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