ERASER: Efficient RTL FAult Simulation Framework with Trimmed Execution Redundancy

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Tang, Jiaping, Mu, Jianan, Liu, Silin, Liu, Zizhen, Gu, Feng, Zhang, Xinyu, Wang, Leyan, Liang, Shenwen, Ye, Jing, Li, Huawei, Li, Xiaowei
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Tang, Jiaping
Mu, Jianan
Liu, Silin
Liu, Zizhen
Gu, Feng
Zhang, Xinyu
Wang, Leyan
Liang, Shenwen
Ye, Jing
Li, Huawei
Li, Xiaowei
author_facet Tang, Jiaping
Mu, Jianan
Liu, Silin
Liu, Zizhen
Gu, Feng
Zhang, Xinyu
Wang, Leyan
Liang, Shenwen
Ye, Jing
Li, Huawei
Li, Xiaowei
contents As intelligent computing devices increasingly integrate into human life, ensuring the functional safety of the corresponding electronic chips becomes more critical. A key metric for functional safety is achieving a sufficient fault coverage. To meet this requirement, extensive time-consuming fault simulation of the RTL code is necessary during the chip design phase.The main overhead in RTL fault simulation comes from simulating behavioral nodes (always blocks). Due to the limited fault propagation capacity, fault simulation results often match the good simulation results for many behavioral nodes. A key strategy for accelerating RTL fault simulation is the identification and elimination of redundant simulations. Existing methods detect redundant executions by examining whether the fault inputs to each RTL node are consistent with the good inputs. However, we observe that this input comparison mechanism overlooks a significant amount of implicit redundant execution: although the fault inputs differ from the good inputs, the node's execution results remain unchanged. Our experiments reveal that this overlooked redundant execution constitutes nearly half of the total execution overhead of behavioral nodes, becoming a significant bottleneck in current RTL fault simulation. The underlying reason for this overlooked redundancy is that, in these cases, the true execution paths within the behavioral nodes are not affected by the changes in input values. In this work, we propose a behavior-level redundancy detection algorithm that focuses on the true execution paths. Building on the elimination of redundant executions, we further developed an efficient RTL fault simulation framework, Eraser.Experimental results show that compared to commercial tools, under the same fault coverage, our framework achieves a 3.9 $\times$ improvement in simulation performance on average.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_16473
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ERASER: Efficient RTL FAult Simulation Framework with Trimmed Execution Redundancy
Tang, Jiaping
Mu, Jianan
Liu, Silin
Liu, Zizhen
Gu, Feng
Zhang, Xinyu
Wang, Leyan
Liang, Shenwen
Ye, Jing
Li, Huawei
Li, Xiaowei
Hardware Architecture
As intelligent computing devices increasingly integrate into human life, ensuring the functional safety of the corresponding electronic chips becomes more critical. A key metric for functional safety is achieving a sufficient fault coverage. To meet this requirement, extensive time-consuming fault simulation of the RTL code is necessary during the chip design phase.The main overhead in RTL fault simulation comes from simulating behavioral nodes (always blocks). Due to the limited fault propagation capacity, fault simulation results often match the good simulation results for many behavioral nodes. A key strategy for accelerating RTL fault simulation is the identification and elimination of redundant simulations. Existing methods detect redundant executions by examining whether the fault inputs to each RTL node are consistent with the good inputs. However, we observe that this input comparison mechanism overlooks a significant amount of implicit redundant execution: although the fault inputs differ from the good inputs, the node's execution results remain unchanged. Our experiments reveal that this overlooked redundant execution constitutes nearly half of the total execution overhead of behavioral nodes, becoming a significant bottleneck in current RTL fault simulation. The underlying reason for this overlooked redundancy is that, in these cases, the true execution paths within the behavioral nodes are not affected by the changes in input values. In this work, we propose a behavior-level redundancy detection algorithm that focuses on the true execution paths. Building on the elimination of redundant executions, we further developed an efficient RTL fault simulation framework, Eraser.Experimental results show that compared to commercial tools, under the same fault coverage, our framework achieves a 3.9 $\times$ improvement in simulation performance on average.
title ERASER: Efficient RTL FAult Simulation Framework with Trimmed Execution Redundancy
topic Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16473