LAUDE: LLM-Assisted Unit Test Generation and Debugging of Hardware DEsigns

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Nandal, Deeksha, Revalor, Riccardo, Dan, Soham, Pal, Debjit
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Nandal, Deeksha
Revalor, Riccardo
Dan, Soham
Pal, Debjit
author_facet Nandal, Deeksha
Revalor, Riccardo
Dan, Soham
Pal, Debjit
contents Unit tests are critical in the hardware design lifecycle to ensure that component design modules are functionally correct and conform to the specification before they are integrated at the system level. Thus developing unit tests targeting various design features requires deep understanding of the design functionality and creativity. When one or more unit tests expose a design failure, the debugging engineer needs to diagnose, localize, and debug the failure to ensure design correctness, which is often a painstaking and intense process. In this work, we introduce LAUDE, a unified unit-test generation and debugging framework for hardware designs that cross-pollinates the semantic understanding of the design source code with the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities of foundational Large-Language Models (LLMs). LAUDE integrates prompt engineering and design execution information to enhance its unit test generation accuracy and code debuggability. We apply LAUDE with closed- and open-source LLMs to a large corpus of buggy hardware design codes derived from the VerilogEval dataset, where generated unit tests detected bugs in up to 100% and 93% of combinational and sequential designs and debugged up to 93% and 84% of combinational and sequential designs, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_08856
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LAUDE: LLM-Assisted Unit Test Generation and Debugging of Hardware DEsigns
Nandal, Deeksha
Revalor, Riccardo
Dan, Soham
Pal, Debjit
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Unit tests are critical in the hardware design lifecycle to ensure that component design modules are functionally correct and conform to the specification before they are integrated at the system level. Thus developing unit tests targeting various design features requires deep understanding of the design functionality and creativity. When one or more unit tests expose a design failure, the debugging engineer needs to diagnose, localize, and debug the failure to ensure design correctness, which is often a painstaking and intense process. In this work, we introduce LAUDE, a unified unit-test generation and debugging framework for hardware designs that cross-pollinates the semantic understanding of the design source code with the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities of foundational Large-Language Models (LLMs). LAUDE integrates prompt engineering and design execution information to enhance its unit test generation accuracy and code debuggability. We apply LAUDE with closed- and open-source LLMs to a large corpus of buggy hardware design codes derived from the VerilogEval dataset, where generated unit tests detected bugs in up to 100% and 93% of combinational and sequential designs and debugged up to 93% and 84% of combinational and sequential designs, respectively.
title LAUDE: LLM-Assisted Unit Test Generation and Debugging of Hardware DEsigns
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08856